Bill Harvey: Budget planning linked to the long term

There seems to be very little consistency in health provision planning at present. This has been brought home this week by three apparently unrelated events.

Firstly, a family member asked me for advice about a colleague with posterior subcapsular cataract who, despite their vision now at a level where they were unsafe to drive and finding their work difficult, had been told by their ‘optician’ they were not yet at a level meeting the requirement for NHS treatment of the cataract. Instead, they were advised of a private route likely to incur a consultation fee of £250 and treatment costs approaching several thousand. This was outside their financial limits. I suggested they had a second opinion, have a contrast assessment as part of that, and retry for an NHS referral based upon the impact their cataract was having on their life. This is, however, just another example of how NHS service provision is being constrained due to tightening of budgets.