As National Eye Health Week Draws to a close for another year, the UK remains in desperate need of reliable, up to date data on the eye and hearing health of the population.
With millions of appointments missed or delayed across audiology and ophthalmology, and thousands waiting for cataract surgery, we remain unable to effectively prioritise resources because we don't have national data to show the distribution of need, and to tell us the true numbers of people living with sight and hearing loss, or at risk of these.
Professor Rupert Bourne has written to parliamentarians at Westminster to call on them to ask the government to fund the UKNEHS project, so we can get the data that we need to understand why people are losing their sight due to causes that are preventable.
You can read Rupert's letter here.