As part of the College’s campaign to tackle current and future issues affecting ophthalmology services, the policy team is pleased to announce that we are jointly hosting a Parliamentary event to influence policymakers and drive eye care up the political agenda – and we’d love to get you involved.
The Parliamentary event ‘Westminster Eye Health Day’ will be held on 19 October 2022 and is in association with The Eyes Have It partnership – a national campaign we are part of with other leading voices across the sector including the Macular Society, The Association of Optometrists and RNIB. MPs and policymakers from across the political spectrum will attend this session, where we will communicate the challenges affecting ophthalmology services and present the actions that must be taken to ensure they are met.
In preparation for the event, the partnership has developed a data tool illustrating metrics across primary and secondary eye care – including waiting lists – at local constituency level. This data will be communicated to MPs at the event, emphasising the challenges their local ophthalmology services face. To view your local data and see how it compares nationally, simply follow this link and enter your constituency.
To ensure the event has the biggest possible impact, we encourage you to contact your local MP to see if they would like to attend and understand more about eyecare issues in their area. To make this as simple as possible, we have provided a template email in the data visualisation tool that you can send to your local MP inviting them to the event. All you need to do is:
- Open the tool [link here]
- Search the constituency in which you live
- Click ‘Email MP’
- Replace the second line with the following sentence “As an ophthalmologist in your constituency, our eye clinic teams are continuing to struggle to meet the demand of patients requiring sight saving diagnosis and treatment. Workforce numbers need increasing and technology needs to be improved to join up services between primary and secondary care. For reference, my postcode is XXXX” and insert your home postcode
- In the subject line, replace ‘your constituency’ with the name of your constituency. For example, ‘the picture in Watford’.
- Insert your name at the bottom. You can adapt the rest of the content of the email to your MP as you see fit.
- Press ‘Done’ and send from your email
If you have any questions regarding the event or the data visualisation tool, please contact you Policy Team at [email protected].