File:NEHW OVERVIEW v5a FINAL.mp4
Duration:0:05:15
Date:06/09/2016

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Female:Fourteen million people haven’t had their eyes tested, as recommended, in the last two years.

Male:Five point eight million people are at risk of sight loss as they’re living with sight threatening conditions.

Female:Six million people live with uncorrected refractive error as well as sight threatening conditions.

Pearse Keane:My name is Pearse Keane, I’m a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital and I’m a researcher at the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London.

I think it’s absolutely vital to have regular sight tests. The absolutely crucial reason is that half of all sight loss can be prevented if we pick up the cause for it early and treat it early.

People can face really an array of problems if they don’t have regular sight tests, such as glaucoma which is often something that people are not aware that they have and is irreversible if it gets too advanced without treatment, or conditions such as diabetic eye disease, or age related macular degeneration. All the evidence shows that earlier detection, earlier diagnosis, earlier treatment lets us save sight.

If you have a problem with your eyes one of the first people that you’ll go to is your high street optometrist to be examined. The advances in the technologies that we have, particularly the ocular imaging technologies, means that a lot of the diagnosis of the problems with eye health can now be made in the communities by optometrists.

Examining the eyes actually allows you to pick up things that are of interest for the rest of the body. So, for example, examining the retina would allow you to see changes consistent with hypertension, which means high blood pressure within the body. So if that’s picked up then that might allow you to attend your GP and have a blood pressure test, get treated for that and then reduce the risk of having a stroke or a heart attack at some point in the future.

It’s absolutely crucial, and I can’t emphasise this enough, that people have better awareness about eye health. The interventions are much more straight forward in early disease than people who present at a late stage. The cost of sight loss, that’s the direct medical costs and the indirect costs associated with it, account for about £28bn per year in the UK alone. So if we could prevent half of that, just by educating people to have eye tests, the economic implications for the UK alone would justify it, even in the absence of all the visual benefits that we would give to people.

James Campbell:My name’s James Campbell and I work in the Fire and Rescue Service. I noticed that there was a slight blurriness to the side and the top of my left eye so I decided to contact a local opticians, Specsavers, to take a look at it. They basically said to me that I would have to go and see a specialist. The word tumour never entered my mind until Doctor Brennan had told me what it was that Saturday afternoon.

Wendy Bristow:My name’s Wendy. I had booked a sight test over at the Specsavers where I’d been going regularly. During the test it was quite obvious that I wasn’t able to pick up as many dots that were appearing on the screen as the left eye. The optician said that to be on the safe side he was going to refer me to the eye clinic down at Trilesk, and by the end of the week I was told that the MRI scan had picked up a rather large brain tumour.

Michelle Kirk:I’m Michelle Kirk, I am 30 and I’m from Chorley. I had experienced a really bad headache for about a week and I was walking past Specsavers, went in, they looked at a picture of the back of my eye and said, “You need to take this letter with you, straight to the hospital.” I was diagnosed with intracranial hypertension, which can then lead to blindness and lead to strokes.

I am so grateful that I went in that day because I think it saved my sight.

James Campbell:I can’t thank them enough for finding this and referring me so quickly.

Wendy Bristow:I could have been facing the loss of sight in both my eyes, or obviously even worse outcomes. I can’t be any more grateful for them doing the visual field test on that day. Good timing.

Doug Perkins:Specsavers’ mission, together with RNIB, is to transform the nation’s eye health through education, awareness and action. We want everyone, like the brave people you’ve just heard from, to understand the importance of regular eye tests to help bring an end to avoidable sight loss.

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