Early detection of glaucoma can save sight – Glaucoma Awareness Week

To highlight Glaucoma Awareness Week (27 June – 3 July) we’re shining a light on the role of diagnostic imaging to detect glaucoma and the scale of our work to safeguard the nation’s sight.

Paul Morris, Specsavers Director of Professional Advancement, shares the following.

“It is vital that we work together to raise public awareness of glaucoma – which affects up to 2% of people over the age of 40 and almost 8% of people over the age of 80 – because as many as half of all glaucoma cases are undiagnosed. People don’t know they have it.

We’ve invested in diagnostic imaging technology so that clinicians detect conditions such as glaucoma sooner – which in turn can enable any required treatment to begin quicker than might otherwise be the case.

We believe diagnostic imaging is very important

We started using fundus imaging 16 years ago. OCT now gives us greater diagnostic capability. Today we’ve released our latest statistics highlighting the scale of our work over the last year in detecting glaucoma.

We’ve tested the pressure of 12 million eyes (circa 6 million patients) and conducted 3 million visual field assessments (circa 1.5 million patients) in the UK in the past 12 months. More than 7.4 million OCT scans (circa 3.7 million patients) were captured as part of its diagnostic work over the same period.

Ground-breaking clinical outcomes report updated with visual field data

For the first time, our clinicians can see the type of visual field assessments they order over time, the reasons chosen for the assessment, and much more besides. This data helps us understand the needs of the communities we serve and tailor our care to meet these needs.

The clinical outcomes report gives the mechanism for true reflective practice, a key feature of CPD. Specsavers clinicians contribute to this audit of our work as individuals and in discussion with peers. At a central level, we use the learning to plan training and development for our workforce and this can be targeted very precisely to serve local needs.

The data in this report has never been collected at such scale. We are committed to using the insight it gives to improve patient outcomes.

Almost 100,000 people have been referred for glaucoma-related pathology

If glaucoma is in the family, close relatives can be up to 10 times more likely to develop it. Specsavers assessed more than 800,000 people who are close relatives of someone with glaucoma. Our duty is to save sight. We are pleased to be part of this work at such as scale”