Diabetic Eye Screening – Service Update 15 June 2021

NHS Orkney’s Diabetic Eye Screening (DES) programme is on target to have caught up with all its outstanding patients by the end of June and should soon be back to offering regular annual screenings.

Routine appointments were stopped for four months last year because of the pandemic but urgent and high risk patients were seen again at the end of July and then routine patients again at the end of August.

In the interim the pandemic has meant that there have been changes made to the screening programme.

• DES Revised Interval Screening was implemented from January 1 which meant that some patients have been moved to two-yearly screening intervals provided they have had three years of consecutive screening without problems.

“This is being rolled out over a two-year period with 50% of patients being moved this year and the rest in 2022,” said NHS Orkney’s Diabetic Eye Screening Administrator Nickie Milne.

• The service has also started doing Optical Coherence Tomography Scans (OCT). These scans are used for a more indepth check of the back of the eye if a patient’s retinal photo shows any signs of diabetic retinopathy or maculopathy.

“Previously we would have had to refer these patients to the Eye Clinicand they may have had a 12-week wait to be seen. Now, when we take the retinal photograph, we can scan the patient at the same time and these scans will then be checked by the visiting ophthalmologist within the following month,” Nickie explained.

“We have worked closely with Susan MacLeod, our eye nurse, to set this up and have already been able to identify patients, have them scanned and started eye treatment within a few days which is a huge benefit to patient in retaining their vision.”

• The biggest challenge had been changing the clinic schedules from 10 minute appointments to 20 minute appointments to allow for cleaning, PPE changes and to ensure no overlap of patients in the waiting area.

“This has meant that instead of booking around 35 patients a day we’ve had to reduce to around 20 patients a day. So we have been trying to do two clinics a week to catch up on the backlog of patients,” Nickie said.

“Our patients have told us they are very grateful and found it reassuring that we have been able to see them during this time and have been able to keep a check on their diabetic eye health. 

“It has been hard work doing extra clinics with all the extra cleaning and PPE but satisfying that we have gotten through the backlog of patients and started the new OCT service which should reduce the number of visits for some patients,” Nickie said.

The team has worked closely with the Diabetic Eye Screening Collaborative, meeting weekly then fortnightly throughout the pandemic and working with the National Screening Services who guided the team on restarting a safe service.