Ann Widdecombe, grateful patient, former Conservative MP and star of Strictly Come Dancing, visited Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust on Friday 27 May, to launch the new Moorfields Eye Charity.

Charitable funds have been vital to Moorfields’ Eye Hospital since it opened in 1805. Today, this charitable support helps us to finance cutting edge research into the major causes of blindness and it enables us to develop new treatments. The new charity will provide the focal point for all hospital-led fundraising activity and will support and promote the work of Moorfields Eye Hospital.

“Moorfields strives to make advances in the field of eye care and no matter what government is in place, it will never be possible to fund them all,” says Ann. “This new charity will help support Moorfields in taking this work forward and to keep producing ground-breaking work. It is an honour to be launching the charity and I can only encourage people to support it over the coming years.”

Moorfields Eye Charity will help to provide services and improvements that cannot be achieved within the limits of normal NHS funding.

The charity is raising funds to:

• Support capital improvements;
• Fund cutting-edge ophthalmic research;
• Purchase specialist state-of-the-art medical equipment;
• Support ophthalmic teaching and training;
• Improve the patient environment at any Moorfields’ location;
• Enhance the services provided for the comfort and wellbeing of patients.

-Ends-

Notes to editors

• For further information, please contact Dominic Stevenson, PR and Communications officer, on 020 7566 2628 or dominic.stevenson@moorfields.nhs.uk
• For more information on the Moorfields Eye Charity, please visit www.moorfields.nhs.uk/eyecharity
• 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 deal with more than 400,000 patient visits at our main hospital base in London’s City Road and at 19 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.