“We need to be working with people who have a shared interest”

Eye health and eye care, skills and tools for life, and getting around: these three pillars are at the centre of Royal National Institute of Blind People’s (RNIB) strategy for the second half of the 2020s.

The strategy, published this summer, lays out the targets that the charity hopes to achieve by the end of 2027 – including three quarters of people with long-term eye health conditions being offered person-centered practical and emotional support, access to vision rehabilitation for everyone who loses their sight, and a boost in investment in the UK’s transport accessibility.

Matt Stringer, who has been RNIB chief executive for the past five years, sat down with OT to talk about breaking the charity’s bold ambitions down into manageable chunks of work – and why organisations working together is more important than ever.

Developing a plan for the future

The past three years have been about “confidently, on the front foot, looking outward and really working out what RNIB could and should be doing to support blind and partially sighted people,” Stringer said.

With a new chair and a new group of trustees, it seemed like a natural time to refresh the strategy, he explained.

Acknowledging RNIB’s 150-year history supported the conclusion that the charity should be at the forefront of informing the national debate around eye health and eye care, whilst supporting blind and partially-sighted people and improving how society works for them.

It was integral that the strategy had “a high degree of ambition, as should reflect RNIB and its role in national life,” Stringer said, adding that the conversation focused on not continuing with the same work, but instead “looking to really try to make a difference in how the UK works for blind and partially-sighted people.”

The strategy needed to be “absolutely driven by the insight of blind and partially-sighted people,” Stringer said.

“Their lived experience, their knowledge, what they’re going through on a day-to-day basis, whether in an eye health setting or in a normal life setting, is absolutely critical to us really understanding what's going on and what we need to do about it,” he added.

The strategy, he said, “has been very much informed by the lived experience of a large group of people.”

Focusing on eye health

When it comes to the eye care waiting list, Stringer is unequivocal that “we are all trying to push at the same agenda.”

With 613,000 people waiting for eye care, making up around 8% of the entire NHS waiting list, Stringer emphasised that working together is “massively important.”

“About 10% of outpatient appointments a year are eye health-related,” he said. “A big focus, for the health service, is eye health.”

An ageing population will see people develop more eye conditions as they age, so utilising the capabilities of High Street optometry in prevention and “stepping in at a primary care level, before it gets to secondary care,” is vital, he believes.

RNIB is working in coalition with a number of organisations to try and pull together an end-to-end process, Stringer said – but he emphasises that the system is “horribly fragmented” across the four nations.

He believes that community optometry, the NHS, and the third sector, are not working as cohesively as they could be.

“Working at that prevention and primary care end of the spectrum is going to be a big help,” he said. “As a patient, if you are seen more quickly, and you have a better outcome, it's going to help your life chances. This works by everyone working together.”

Stringer also voiced his support for the AOP’s Sight Won’t Wait campaign, which emphasises that optometry is ready and waiting to help clear the NHS ophthalmology backlog.

The campaign uses real patient stories to highlight the human impact of waiting lists.

“At every stage of someone’s eye health journey, we see emotional aspects,” Stringer said, adding: “You might be getting a very difficult diagnosis. The emotional side is something that is very much front-of-mind for us.”

The emotional side is something that is very much front-of-mind for us

Pragmatic change

A specific goal that RNIB has is to increase the understanding of low vision certification amongst local authorities.

“We need them to understand about giving certificates of visual impairment, so people can have access to the support they need,” Stringer said.

Stringer explained that RNIB is currently being contacted by people who have been unable to take up job offers because delays to Access to Work mean they have been waiting for an assessment on their living environment, or for the local authority to provide them with technological support.

“People have had their life chances diminished by the slowness of the rehabilitation process to provide domestic support” Stringer said.

“Their life is shrunk” because of this, Stringer believes.

This is a responsibility that local authorities already have, he emphasised. Regulation, which RNIB is working on, “would make a big difference.”

“We’ll try, over the three years, to get a much greater number of local authorities discharging their responsibilities,” he said.

“If we can get that local authority provision doing what it should do already, that will be an enormous step forward. That, for us, is a realistic three-year target.”

Aside from the RNIB's strategy, OT wants to hear about any progress made on the backlog in Access to Work applications – something the charity has campaigned about.

RNIB engaged with the Department of Work and Pensions in late 2023, Stringer explained, about the length of the waiting list. This led to the charity providing training for over 100 civil servants on how to better process visually impaired applicants.

The training saw applicants begin to move more quickly through the process, although the overall waiting list remains relatively high.

“We are continuing to engage with this and push it hard, because it’s a critical process,” Stringer said, adding that RNIB is still being contacted by individuals who have had job offers rescinded because it has taken so long for their claims to be processed.

RNIB has written to the Labour government to emphasise that “it hasn’t gone away as an issue,” he confirmed.

“Your life is diminished, if you don’t feel comfortable traveling”

The third pillar of RNIB’s strategy is focused on increasing how confident blind and partially sighted people feel about making journeys when and how they want to.

“A majority of visually impaired people find it difficult to travel around the UK,” Stringer said.

He added: “If a majority of people find it difficult, then they’re not traveling, and that means they don’t go to work, they don’t go to an education location, they don’t follow hobbies, they don’t meet friends and family. Your life is diminished, if you don’t feel comfortable traveling.”

Part of the problem comes from urban landscapes changing enormously with increasing technology, Stringer believes.

An RNIB goal is to “get people to understand how to both design, but also how to operate within, an environment where blind and partially-sighted people move around,” he said.

Part of this lies in encouraging people to think more positively about shared spaces, Stringer said, using the introduction of ‘floating bus stops’ as an example for design that does not work for blind or partially sighted people.

“We want to have a design that works for everybody,” Stringer said. “Sometimes we believe that the visually impaired perspective is not necessarily well considered.”

Engagement with Network Rail and the Department of Transport in recent years has brought forward the introduction of tactile platform edges on stations that have seen fatal accidents, and the timeline for this work being completed has now been brought forward to 2026.

Sometimes we believe that the visually impaired perspective is not necessarily well considered

“A lot of our transport infrastructure is Victorian,” Stringer said. “It’s badly designed; it’s inaccessible. Lifts don’t exist, and signage is visual, not audio.”

Work on a local level to roll out better navigation, signage and accessible comms to bus stations and railway stations across the country is also taking place, and RNIB hopes to “ultimately knit that together into something that's more of a national improvement,” Stringer said.

He also noted the importance of the government’s plan to nationalise the railways, expressing RNIB’s intention to inform the accessibility dimension of it before it goes through Parliament.

Educating the public to think more about those with disabilities is also a goal, and a recent pilot in Islington, North London, has proved successful in this.

In the pilot, the public were encouraged to think about the consequences of discarding e-bikes on pavements and leaving dustbins out on the street. Brochures and other materials were available for download, leading to a high level of engagement on the issues at play.

"We’ve had a positive response and really deepened that community’s understanding of these issues,” Stringer said. “In some respects, it’s just being more informed and thoughtful about some of these everyday things where, unwittingly, you might be hindering the passage of visually impaired people by your actions.”

RNIB is now developing plans to roll the pilot out more widely.

Mobilising policymakers and the public

OT is interested in how RNIB is working with others to achieve its 2027 targets – from the general public to policymakers at the heart of Westminster, via healthcare stakeholders across the country.

Stringer is quick to emphasise that, whilst RNIB is a strong organisation with a longstanding heritage and a lot of insight, working collaboratively is critical.

“Whether we’re trying to advance on a moral eye health dimension, or more of a social impact dimension, we need to be working with people who have a shared interest,” he said.

This means building relationships with the NHS across the devolved nations, to ensure that RNIB's work has relevance across the UK.

“Government comes in many levels. Organisations need to think very carefully about increasing devolution in the UK,” Stringer believes, using the 14 regional mayors as an example of local government that adds “another layer that we need to engage with.”

“We've got good teams in the devolved nations and good regional campaigning teams, to engage at that level,” Stringer said.

When it comes to central government, Stringer hopes that work RNIB did with Labour’s shadow health team on the eye care dimension of NHS waiting lists and on prevention before the General Election will bear fruit.

The charity also attended all three of this autumn’s political party conferences.

Within eye health, Stringer mentions RNIB’s work within the Vision Partnership and the Disability Charity Consortium, the latter of which he will be representing at the COVID-19 Inquiry in October.

Strong relationships with membership associations are also vital.

“For all of us, there is an onus to work really well and collaboratively with a number of people,” Stringer said.

“We’re all pushing at the same agendas – trying to get eye health advanced on the national picture, and trying to address issues around rehabilitation, around employment, and around education, all of which we’ve got common ground in,” he said.

He added: “There’s a greater maturity, I think, in the relationships that are being built.”

We’re all pushing at the same agendas – trying to get eye health advanced on the national picture

What about engagement with the public – how does RNIB plan to mobilise individuals and communities to take the actions that they want them to take, to positively influence the lives of those with sight loss?

A key aspect of the long-term strategy is making a shift from being an organisation that has a lot of service provision to an organisation that can affect social change, Stringer revealed.

Social change comes about via many of the channels discussed, Stringer explained: pilots in Islington to increase local community understanding, activities in the devolved nations, and freeing up funds to invest in campaigning work.

“We’re trying to engage society, either through local pilots or through national campaigns, to understand some of these issues, and to think differently about visually impaired people,” he said.

Part of that is a call to arms for volunteering, fundraising, and engagement with RNIB's content, he added: “We've got to work very hard at getting people to engage with our purpose and mission.”

Read more about RNIB's Strategy 2024–2027 online.