New ocular oncology service at Moorfields Eye Hospital

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will take responsibility for the management of ocular oncology services across southern England on Monday 29 June, as part of a new contract with NHS England, which commissions this highly specialised service nationally.

The service will continue to operate on two sites, as it did under the previous NHS England contract with Barts Health NHS Trust. All outpatient clinics will now take place at Moorfields’ City Road hospital, while surgery will be carried out at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in West Smithfield.

“We are delighted to be one of only three centres in England and Wales to offer this highly specialised service, which represents an important addition to our comprehensive ophthalmic portfolio,” says medical director Declan Flanagan.

“Under our new contract with NHS England, Moorfields will be responsible for the care and administration of all patients who require treatment for eye tumours, in addition to those we currently treat for cancers of the eyelid and orbit.”

The new service includes three consultants, two clinical nurse specialists, clinic nursing staff, a multidisciplinary team co-ordinator, and a data manager.

Retinoblastoma will continue to be managed by Barts Health NHS Trust as part of their paediatric service.

For referral information, please visit www.moorfields.nhs.uk/GP

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 Editors’ notes:

• 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 also one of the new academic health science networks. We were one of the first NHS organisations to achieve foundation trust status in 2004. 

• 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 more than 600,000 patient attendances in 2014/15 across our 22 locations in and around London, enabling us to provide expert care closer to patients’ homes.

• Our specialist A&E dealt with more than 95,000 patient visits in the year 2014/15.

• With our academic partners at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Moorfields is recognised as a leading centre of excellence in eye and vision research. Together, we form one of the largest ophthalmic research sites in the world, with the largest patient population in Europe  or the USA. We publish more scientific papers than any other eye  and vision research site, and have an extensive joint research portfolio.

 For further information, please visit  www.moorfields.nhs.uk.