FIRST MINISTERS QUESTIONS

Eye Care

14:15

Janet Finch-Saunders

Minister, the delivery plan acknowledges the need to work on the delays—and that was raised a lot in the plan—in patients being seen for follow-up treatment. Will the Minister provide an update on the action taken by your Government to work with the NHS Wales Informatics Service to develop electronic referrals and electronic patient records for eye care in order to deal with this problem?

14:16

Carwyn Jones/The First Minister

Yes, we work very closely with them. It’s important that the patients involved do not experience any delays. We have invested £34 million in extra eye care in terms of primary and secondary care over the past three years, and, indeed, provided new treatment. It was only in 2007 that there was no treatment available for wet age-related macular degeneration. Now, of course, 16,000 courses of treatment are being provided in Wales, and that helps, of course, to prevent sight loss that was caused by wet AMD—a treatment that wasn’t available, of course, before 2007.