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Standards & Guidance

Our range of high-quality guidance helps to maintain standards in the planning, practice and commissioning of patient care. Our clinical guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations across all aspect of care or of eye conditions; Concise Practice Points make recommendations for less frequent and targeted clinical situations, succinctly describing the scientific and clinical evidence alongside expert input to enhance clinician and patient decision making. Our Commissioning guidance supports eye units to develop services to meet local population needs.

Measuring follow up timeliness and risk for performance reporting, improvement actions and targeting failsafe procedures in England

This document describes the recommended method for ophthalmology providers to measure delays to follow-up care using a patient administration system (PAS) field which can submit data to NHS Digital to assess national performance, provide data for managing individual patients and services, and allow reporting to commissioners and trust executive teams. This allows the calculation of the Portfolio of Eye Health & Care follow up indicator of % of hospital outpatient appointments that occur within 25% of their intended follow up period, including rescheduling or hospital initiated cancellations14. In order to ensure consistency across providers on derived metrics, it is essential that data collected from any PAS has been recorded in a consistent and equitable manner.

RCOphth Statement on Ethambutol Toxicity

NHS Improvement has highlighted two recent incidents of severe visual loss due to delayed diagnosis of optic neuropathy from ethambutol. In 2015, 5758 cases of tuberculosis were notified in England and ethambutol is frequently prescribed in its initial phase of treatment.  Although ethambutol optic neuropathy is rare, members are strongly reminded of the possibility of this cause of preventable sight loss and to ensure that current guidance is followed.

Serum Eye Drops for the Treatment of Severe Ocular Surface Disease: Executive Summary

Dry eye disease is a global public-health problem with significant impact on quality of life. Serum Eye Drops (SED) contain many nutritional factors that aid therapeutics. Across the NHS There is variation in practice, inequality of access to SED service and no regulated monitoring outcome. This guideline sets out defined criteria for the use of Serum Eye Drops, monitoring of clinical and patient-reported outcomes to improve patient morbidity and standards of care.