Proposed move of Moorfields Eye Hospital’s City Road services

The proposal to move Moorfields Eye Hospital, University College London’s Institute of Opthalmology and Moorfield’s Charity to a new site at St. Pancras in London has been approved.

Camden Clinical Commissioning Group on behalf of those CCGs across England that commission services from Moorfields City Road site, in partnership with NHS England/Improvement Specialised Commissioning (London), consulted between 24 May and 16 September 2019 on a proposal to relocate services from Moorfields Eye Hospital’s City Road site to St Pancras. This new-build centre will bring together excellent eye care, ground-breaking research and world-leading education in ophthalmology.

This project will be a partnership between Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology (IoO). Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL will sell the current land at City Road, and all proceeds of the sale will be reinvested in a multi-million pound development on land available at the site of St Pancras Hospital, just north of King’s Cross and St Pancras stations in central London.

During the consultation around 4,600 contributions were received, of which 1,511 were completed consultation surveys. People also gave their feedback in other ways including emails, discussion groups, phone calls, letters and via the virtual assistant on the consultation’s website. You can read the final outcome report at https://oriel-london.org.uk/consultation-documents/ .

To further explore and discuss the findings and their impact upon the proposals, the report and proposals were presented at:

• North Central London’s Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 31 January 2020. A link to the papers from this meeting can be found https://www.minutes.haringey.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=697&MId=9242&Ver=4 .
• NHS England London Region Executive Team on behalf of Specialised Commissioning on 4 February 2020 to make a final decision on the proposal.
• A Committees in Common, comprising 14 ‘lead’ CCGs with material contracts defined as greater than £2m per annum at Moorfields’ City Road site, on 12 February 2020 to make a final decision on the proposal. A link to the papers from this meeting can be found https://www.islingtonccg.nhs.uk/jccc-meetings/committees-in-common-moorfields-eye-hospital-relocation/103835?postdiaryentryid=290006&ignore=committees-in-common-moorfields-eye-hospital-relocation&postid=103835.

The Committees in Common has now approved the proposal.

Further engagement and co-production will now be undertaken with staff, the local community and service users to develop and design the new centre. This will include:

• Development and implementation of an accessibility plan, which will be co-designed in partnership with sight loss charities, the Oriel Advisory Group, patients, transport providers, local authorities, commissioners and voluntary organisations. The Trust will ensure plans and processes are in place to enable patients to travel to the new centre safely.
• Continued involvement of the Oriel Advisory Group and the extensive range of stakeholders that have contributed to the consultation, in the development of the new centre at the St Pancras site.
• To realise the potential benefits of new clinical pathways and working at scale, a London Ophthalmology Collaborative will be established to progress system-wide service redesign of eye care services across London.
• Development of an organisational development programme to realise the benefits of integrating research, education and innovation with clinical practice.

In addition, Moorfields Eye Hospital will review the feedback received on the patient experience during the consultation and will address areas of improvement before implementation of Oriel where possible. The Trust will also proactively work with partners to ensure that the impacts identified in the Integrated Health Inequalities and Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA) are mitigated as far as possible and the potential positive impacts are harnessed, in a plan to be developed in response to each of the recommendations arising from the IIA.

ENDS