Moorfields Eye Hospital worked alongside a range of charities and local healthcare partners to celebrate World Sight Day on Thursday 8 October.

Events were held in two locations where Moorfields provides its expert eye care, and the trust also signed up to international charity Vision 2020, along with its research partners at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, adding its support to initiatives to raise public awareness of blindness and vision impairment.

Health promotion events were held at the trust’s main hospital base in London’s City Road and at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, which is home to one of its local outreach centres, providing expert eye care closer to patients’ homes. 

“The focus of the events was to highlight the importance of having regular sight tests to maintain good eye health, with expert advice from Moorfields’ specialist staff,” explains Moorfields nurse Hewlyn Heywood, part of the team that organised the day’s activities. 

“In particular, we focused on the links between good eye health and smoking cessation, diabetes care and healthy eating.”

The events were also supported by charities Diabetes UK, the International Glaucoma Association, the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Action for Blind People, as well as by healthcare colleagues from NHS City and Hackney and NHS Wandsworth’s  smoking cessation teams. 

World Sight Day is an annual event led by Vision 2020, which

aims to raise public awareness of blindness and vision impairment as major international public health issues, influence governments to participate in and designate funds for national blindness prevention programmes, and educate target audiences about blindness prevention.

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Notes to editors

• Moorfields is one of the world’s leading eye hospitals, providing expertise in clinical care, research and education.  We have provided excellence in eye care for more than 200 years and we continue to be at the forefront of new breakthroughs and developments.   We are an integral part of one of the UK’s first academic health science centres, UCL Partners, and recently celebrated five years as one of the country’s first NHS foundation trusts.
• We treat the entire range of eye diseases, from common complaints to rare conditions which require treatments not available anywhere else in the UK.  We dealt with around 400,000 patient visits in 2008/09 at our main hospital base in London’s City Road and at 12 other sites in and around the capital, enabling us to provide expert care closer to patients’ homes.
• With our research partners at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, we run one of the largest ophthalmic research programmes in the world and have the highest measure of scientific productivity and impact in the world for our research activity. 
• For further information, please visit www.moorfields.nhs.uk

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