The NHS 10-Year Plan sets out a long-term vision to transform healthcare delivery across England by improving access, reducing inequalities, and ensuring more services are delivered within communities rather than in hospital settings. One of the key ambitions of the plan is to shift appropriate care closer to where people live, taking pressure off hospital outpatient services and improving patient experience, and eye care — one of the busiest outpatient specialties in the NHS — is highlighted for its potential to benefit from community-led models of care.
In Gloucestershire, the Community Ophthalmic Link exemplifies what those ambitions look like in practice. Developed through collaboration between NHS Gloucestershire, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, local optometry practices, key industry partners and the Gloucestershire Local Optical Committee, this digital system connects community optometrists directly to hospital eye care records and imaging in a bi-directional way. Optometrists can view and upload imaging including OCT scans, clinical data/notes and visual fields tests in real time, enabling better-informed clinical decisions, more local patient management and fewer unnecessary hospital referrals.
This talk will explore how the link was introduced, how it works in everyday clinical practice, how it supports the strategic goals of the NHS 10-Year Plan and why it has been recognised as a model of joined-up care. We will describe not only the practical benefits it has brought for clinicians and people seeking eye care in Gloucestershire and how it has eased the load on secondary care, but also how the design of the system — leveraging digital integration to help clinicians make swifter, more accurate assessments without compromising safety or quality — is fully scalable and ready to be extended beyond Gloucestershire to support other communities seeking to deliver care closer to home.
By reflecting on what has been achieved so far and the ongoing opportunities to extend this way of working, the talk will highlight how putting the right tools and partnerships in place can help make the NHS’s ambitions for community-focused, accessible and patient-centred care a reality.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Outline the strategic context and highlight complexities Understand how the NHS 10-Year Plan promotes community-focused services and digital innovation, and why eye care is identified as an area suited to community-led transformation whilst understanding the significant challenges involved.
2. 2. Describe the collaboration model Articulate how the Community Ophthalmic Link works — including its bi-directional digital access to hospital records and imaging — and the collaborative partnerships that made it possible.
3. 3. Identify practical benefits Recognise the tangible clinical and service benefits in Gloucestershire, such as enhanced decision-making in primary care, reduced unnecessary referrals to hospital eye clinics and improved patient experience.
4. 4. Appreciate scalability and replication potential Discuss how this approach is scalable and how similar models could be readily adopted in other systems to support the NHS’s goal of moving appropriate care closer to home.