Delivering hospital eye care closer to home
The NHS Confederation is an improvement-focused organisation and we are committed to supporting members to implement and identify solutions to known national challenges.
A key challenge for health services is how to practically provide care closer to home rather than in an acute hospital, to help reduce waiting lists and improve access and experience for patients.
As of early 2025, ophthalmology remains the busiest outpatient specialty in the NHS (Healthwatch 2025), providing specialist care for conditions affecting the eyes and vision. These services include the diagnosis, treatment, and management of a wide range of eye disorders such as cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration, diabetic eye disease, and infections. Long waits for outpatient procedures can lead to harm for patients and potentially permanently reduce a person’s quality of life.
In the push to improve access and outcomes by moving care closer to home, ophthalmology is a key area in which patient experience can readily be improved by making use of and building upon existing resources outside of hospitals.
This programme is an opportunity for local multidisciplinary teams across a neighbourhood, acute and ICS footprint to be supported to understand, plan and create the infrastructure and processes to move ophthalmology care closer to a home via optometry practices in local neighbourhoods.
The approach to the programme
The programme will run for 8-months from November 2025 to July 2026. There will be a total of six virtual learning sessions, with up to six teams selected across England.
Through the programme, you and your teams will receive extensive support to design and create solutions to move services for your chosen sub-discipline of ophthalmology from a hospital setting into the wider community.
The objectives are to support teams to:
- Identify, plan and agree the scale of transition
- Work together with peers and experts to create a robust implementation plan
- Create a final blueprint for service transition
You will benefit from:
- Advice and support from expert leaders across healthcare on service redesign and commissioning
- Working with peers across England tackling the same issue and learning from each other
- A range of key steps that underpin good service redesign e.g. building the strategic and economic case, implementation planning and finance
- Process mapping and working with local stakeholders to redesign to meet patient and public needs balanced against strategic directives such as reducing waiting lists and cost saving
- A range of tools and resources to help guide you from the current state to the future ambition
- Opportunities to contribute and be part of wider work and publications relating to acute care moving out of hospital
The sessions will be presented in a safe, non-judgmental space, where you will also be able to hear from other teams working on similar issues in different parts of the country, as well as expert guest speakers offering advice and support based on experience, research and learning.
How to apply
Applications open on 8 October and close on 30 October 2025.
After carefully reading through all of the essential information, you can apply by completing this application form.
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Your team
This programme is designed for local MDT teams to be formed across sectors to come together to work on designing and creating solutions to enable ophthalmology acute services to transition out to the wider community setting.
For example, your team could include colleagues from an acute hospital such as Consultant Ophthalmologist, Optometrist, Nurse/AHP and Operational Business Manager along with your ICS/System commissioner, Eye Care Liaison Officer, operational, governance or finance leads, and out-of-hospital leads such as local optometry leads or GPs with extend roles in Ophthalmology.
The team should:
- Have colleagues across sectors from clinical, operational and commissioning aspects
- Have a minimum of 6 people to ensure meaningful engagement and discussions amongst the local teams
- Have a key leader assigned in your team to co-ordinate your project
- Consider including patient excerpt/representative, data analyst and improvement support at a local level.
Your project area
As part of the application, you will be asked to outline a sub-specialty that you would like to focus on, and describe some of the challenges you are facing and where you see the opportunities for improvement to be.
In the process of forming your team, you should have backing from your system and obtain approval from a Senior Responsible Officer (e.g. Executive Director who supports your project). We also recommend notifying your regional NHS England lead.
The proposal should be something that all members of your team agree to work on. We do not expect you to have full approval to transition the service, we recognise many teams are at the early stages of wanting to build a case/explore care closer to home and influence decision making.
The core aim is to support you to create and design your local transition plan for providing ophthalmology services closer to home, that is of high quality and standard to help lead to success in securing and implementing it in practice. We anticipate some teams will move to implementation stage through this programme but it is not a requirement for all teams.
Programme schedule
You will benefit from a structured course of resources and learning sessions focused on service transformation, as well as examples of inspirational best practice and guidance. All of the sessions will be delivered remotely, with the details as follows:
- Session one: Setting the scene (27 November 2025 9:30-12:30)
- Session two: Designing the future (13 January 2026 13:00-16:00)
- Session three: Finance and funding (26 February 2026 13:00-16:00)
- Session four: The implementation plan (24 March 2026 13:00-16:00)
- Session five: Engaging on the final plan (6th May 2026 13:00-16:00)
- Session six: Evaluation and celebration (9 July 2026 09:30-12:30)
If your organisation is a member of the NHS Confederation, there is no cost associated.
We have over 150 trusts in membership, to find out if yours is one please contact acutenetwork@nhsconfed.org. This offer is open to members in England only.
Expert Partner
Primary Eyecare Services is a not-for-profit primary eye care provider at scale. They operate in 800 neighbourhoods working with multiple Integrated Care Boards across England, delivering high quality eye care services. They collaborate with Local Optical Committees, NHS commissioners and NHS trusts to provide locally accessible eye care to patients at scale. Their services are provided in neighbourhoods via local opticians, from the smallest independent practices to the largest chains.
This programme is also being supported by the Q community, which is now part of the NHS Confederation. Q is diverse membership community collaboratively accelerating the improvement of care in the UK and Ireland. The community learns together, supports each other and shares insights and approaches to address health system challenges. By leveraging the knowledge and experience of the community and partners, Q has a ‘whole world’ view of health and care in the UK and Ireland.
