The charity Sense reported this week that thousands were suffering alone or being abandoned in care homes simply because professionals missed the problems. It has launched a 10-point guide aimed at improving identification of deafblindness to opticians, GPs, and care homes. The guide will be distributed nationally in the next few weeks. Sense's aim is to raise awareness of older people who are deafblind. It said the numbers being identified fell significantly short of official government figures. It claimed that health workers and other professionals reported one in 100 people over 75 had both serious sight and hearing problems, but studies by the Department of Health and the Royal National Institute for the Blind put the figure at 337,000 or one in 13. There are more than 4m people in the UK aged 75 or over, of whom 750,500 have a visual impairment. Sense acting chief executive Malcolm Matthews said: 'The combination of sight and hearing loss can completely isolate elderly people. It can be very difficult to identify people with this condition. That's why we've launched an easy guide so people can detect sight and hearing loss in their friends and relatives at an early stage.'