Helping people with sight loss
2 April 2021 (last updated 24 July 2024)
Emotional, psychological and practical support was launched at Moorfields over 10 years ago and has developed into highly valued and life-changing patient support services
The Eye Clinic Liaison Officers (ECLOs) are a vital part of this offer, giving patients advice, confidence and connecting them with others.
Pioneering new approaches to supporting patients
We’re delighted to be supporting the ECLOs’ work, enabled through generous support from the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust.
Adapting to life with sight loss can be a long-lasting, difficult and often traumatic journey.
In fact, vision is the sense that people fear losing the most, and sight loss and blindness have a disproportionate impact on quality of life.
70%
of people who lose their sight suffer from some level of depression and/or anxiety as a result
40%
of people with low vision suffer from some level of depression and/or anxiety as a result
Despite this, care for people who are losing their sight was traditionally focused on treating their eyes, and many did not have access to emotional, practical or psychological support that could help them learn to live with sight loss.
Offering help, when it’s needed most
Just over a decade ago, Moorfields launched new patient support services as part of its ambition to offer world-class practical and psychological support to patients alongside clinical care and world-class eye research.
The idea was to offer comprehensive emotional, psychological and practical support to patients when they needed it the most.
The ECLOs’ emotional and practical support continues to have a transformative and lasting impact on the quality of experience for our patients as they face the challenge of sight loss. We’re extremely grateful to the trustees of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust for their generosity and support.
Sheila Adam, chief nurse and executive director of allied health professionals, Moorfields Eye Hospital
These pioneering services included Eye Clinic Liaison Officers (ECLOs) giving patients advice, confidence and connections, counsellors and the certificate of vision impairment (CVI) team.
The introduction of these services was a hugely innovative step and one of the first dedicated hospital-based patient support services in the UK.
Following on from this, the charity funded a new ELCO coordinator post within the service. Their role was to bring the ECLO team, which is spread across Moorfields’ many sites, under a single structure and create a strategy for the growth and development of the programme. They also helped to train and develop ECLOs.
We’re very pleased to have the opportunity to support the Eye Clinic Liaison Officers and to enable this service to develop into an embedded element of Moorfields’ patient support offer. It’s of vital importance to look at patients’ needs as a whole: psychological and practical, as well as medical.
Frances Carey, chair, Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust
The new services supported patients by providing therapeutic psychological intervention, advice on living with sight loss, right through to help completing paperwork and accessing community support services.
The services, then and now, support patients from a range of age groups - from 17 right up to 94 years old, across all ethnicities and backgrounds.
