RNIB is campaigning for major improvements in community care and eye health/eye care services to ensure blind and partially sighted people get timely support and to eliminate preventable sight loss.
Less than one third of people who could be registered as blind or partially sighted are registered and receiving care services.
Improving Lives - Ending the Community Care Lottery
Community care for blind and partially sighted people is a postcode lottery. Huge variations exist across the country in the availability, quality and timeliness of community care services and in the charges applied by local authorities for these services. This means huge disparities in the quality of life of blind and partially sighted people, their relatives and carers, from one area to the next, and huge costs - human and financial - arising from avoidable dependency and ill-health.
For example "Lost vision - Older visually impaired people in the UK" (RNIB 1998) found that:
- almost one in three older blind and partially sighted people can identify areas of their lives where they need help, but do not receive it;
- half are unable to cook for themselves or wash their own clothes; and
- 60% never go out alone and 40% identify loneliness as particularly worrying".
RNIB wants to see an increase in the overall resources going into community care services for blind and partially sighted people and an improvement in the standards of services nation-wide. We believe that the only way to achieve this is through a National Service Framework for Visual Impairment.
We also want free personal care in all settings - not just residential care. Charging for home care services is a particular concern for blind and partially sighted people. We are opposed to such charges because they impoverish the poorest people in society, forcing them to have to choose between paying for basic care and meeting other necessary daily living needs.
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Promoting eye health - preventing blindness
Some people simply shouldn't lose their sight in the first place. Yet many remain at risk of eye disease and unnecessary sight loss because of the deterrent effects of charges for eye tests and spectacles, underinvestment in eye care and eye health promotion and inadequate regulation. RNIB campaigned successfully for the reintroduction of free eye tests for people over 60 but further radical change is needed, not least the restoration of free sight tests for all. The most recent threat to eye health comes in the shape of Customs and Excise's proposal to impose full VAT on the the dispensing of spectacles and contact lenses - a move RNIB is determined to resist. Link to:-
