£73m UK cataract success:
This article was originally published in Clinica
Executive Summary
The UK's Department of Health has announced that its £73m ($137m) initiative to cut waiting times for cataract surgery to under three months has been achieved, four years ahead of schedule. Most waits have been reduced to less than six weeks. As well as funding extra NHS activity, the investment was used to pay for some 13,000 independent sector operations, in the form of two mobile ophthalmology units. At the launch of the programme some 50,000 patients were waiting for over three months for the surgery. While welcoming this progress, the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) said it awaited an "equal investment" in other areas of eye care, such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The DoH has so far spent £4m on piloting programmes for these.