Neighbourhood Health – What it means for optometry
20 July 2026
The NHS Neighbourhood Health agenda continues to shape the future of healthcare, with a focus on delivering more care closer to home, improving prevention and strengthening integration across local services.
Community eye care is already delivering many of these ambitions by reducing pressure on general practice and hospitals, supporting people with long-term conditions, providing earlier intervention and improving access to care within local communities. Yet, despite this, community optometry is not consistently represented in neighbourhood planning discussions.
As neighbourhood models continue to develop, Local Optical Committees (LOCs) have a vital role to play in ensuring that community optometry is recognised as a key part of local healthcare delivery. Through engaging with local partnerships, commissioners and provider collaboratives, the sector can help demonstrate how community eye care supports local priorities and contributes to wider NHS objectives.
Primary Eyecare Services is working alongside LOCs and system partners locally to outline how our services align with the new NHS Neighbourhood health framework and working together with GP partners (including Collaboratives and GP Federations) on how we can build on this to enable the greater delivery of community eye care and other services – all supported by evidence, case studies and real-world examples of impact.
Our message is simple: neighbourhood health cannot succeed if it overlooks one of the NHS’s most accessible and scalable primary care assets.
Optometry has a vital role to play in delivering the shift from hospital to community (Urgent Eye Care and Planned Eye Care), treatment to prevention (CVD, Frailty and Eye Care Support Pathway), and fragmented care to integrated neighbourhood services.
See our infographic outlining these alignments and priorities below.
Please engage with your local clinical leads and other Primary Eyecare Services Colleagues as we explore this and develop it together.
Click the infographic below to view full size 🔎:
