Political leadership on the 10-Year Health Plan’s shift from hospital to community is needed, AOP chief executive says

Optometry is ready to help the NHS deliver care closer to home, Adam Sampson said during an AOP panel event at the Labour Party Conference

7 min read

The full AOP and Progressive Britain panel are sat behind a table with a blue tablecloth

Lucy Miller

02 October 2025

The optometry profession needs to see how the 10-Year Health Plan’s shift from hospital to community will be implemented, AOP chief executive, Adam Sampson, told attendees at the Labour Party Conference.

“What we have to see is political leadership in this space,” Sampson emphasised.

Sampson was speaking during the AOP’s fringe event, Healthcare on Every High Street: Making Change Happen Now – Not in a Decade, which was hosted in collaboration with think tank Progressive Britain.

He also emphasised how ready optometry is to help in the realisation of the Government’s plan.

“Optometry has got all the tools,” he told attendees.

Speaking about how quickly change could be made, Sampson said: “Turning on optometry in England in the way devolved governments have done in Wales and in Scotland would take them two years – nothing more.”

The Minister of State for Care, Stephen Kinnock, was a speaker on the panel.

Kinnock called the portfolio he inherited after the 2024 General Election a “disaster area” in terms of waiting lists, and encouraged attendees to bear in mind the progress that the Government has made in the months since – including a 19% uplift to the pharmacy contract and the recruitment of 2000 more GPs against a 1000 target.

“At a strategic level, we’re looking at addressing the challenges that we face over a 10-year period, through the 10-Year Plan,” Kinnock said.

He explained: “There are three big shifts in that: from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention, from analogue to digital.”

Kinnock added: “You couldn’t have a clearer direction of policy intent than, for example, the hospital to community pillar of the 10-Year Plan. That is a vitally important shift.”

The neighbourhood health service is “the enabler of that shift,” he said, adding that the Government wants to see neighbourhood health centres “across every community of the country.”

Kinnock also noted that the 43 areas where the neighbourhood health service has been rolled out were selected in order to “focus on patients with long-term and complex issues.”

The Government’s ultimate aim is “creating a culture of neighbourhood health services,” Kinnock said.

He also acknowledged the value of optometry as part of the solution.

“Optometrists want to do more, [and] are absolutely capable of doing more,” Kinnock said.

He added: “We’ve got to start to do more to break down this silo between the High Street and secondary care.”

He also called the concept of a single point of access for digital imaging “an interesting and exciting tool” that “can really support the speed of diagnosis and of patient care, and that transition from High Street to specialist when those referrals are taking place.”

“It’s about improving that patient journey. It’s about improving access, and it’s about getting better patient outcomes,” Kinnock added.

Sampson emphasised that the AOP is “thoroughly behind the three shifts” that the Government has laid out.

However, he noted that the direction of travel currently seems to be towards hospital care, rather than away from it.

Sampson used the example of glaucoma services being decommissioned in Hampshire from April 2025 as an example of care shifting out of the community and back towards hospitals.

A mismatch between need and capacity

Chairing the panel, councillor Dr Sara Hyde, the executive member for health and social care on Islington Council, noted that nine in 10 patient interactions take place in primary care settings.

There is a “mismatch between eye care, eye health, and the NHS’ ability to meet it,” Hyde said.

Charlotte Refsum, director of health policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, noted the prevention is often viewed as a “containment measure,” rather than a strategy that is implemented before a condition becomes an active problem.

Refsum, a former GP, questioned the value of undertaking work at integrated care board level 42 times across the country, rather than once at a national level.

She explained that, when she was working as a GP, patients would regularly come to her with eye conditions despite there being a MECS commissioned locally.

Underpinned by a single patient record, the NHS App should be able to guide patients to seek treatment in the correct place, Refsum said.

Making the concept of neighbourhood health a reality

Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said different stakeholders are often talking about different things when it comes to the concept of ‘neighbourhood health.’

If the most disadvantaged communities are not at the centre of neighbourhood health the “qualitative shift” required will not succeed, Taylor believes.

The conditions needed to achieve the required change include utilisation of primary care, including optometry, at scale, he said.

This message was reiterated by Kinnock elsewhere at conference, including during the Health & Care Forum’s Prevention in Practice: How Neighbourhood Health Services Can Transform the NHS event. During the event, Kinnock emphasised that “optometry is absolutely a vital part of the neighbourhood health service.”

Taylor also emphasised that the shift must include other services alongside the health service.

“If you knock on doors and you try and solve people’s problems, they won’t just be about health,” he said.

Taylor also noted the importance of incentivising the shift via financial models.

Incentivising is “all to do with financial flows,” Taylor said: “how it is we incentivise more work at a local level, [and] how it is we focus on outcomes, not just activity levels.”

He added: “These are very, very hard problems in all health services around the world. Doing that when there is not much extra money makes it even harder.”

Taylor also emphasised the importance of “bringing acutes to the table” when it comes to the redesign of services – including “committing to shifting their resource upstream.”

During the panel, Oliver Coppard, the Mayor of South Yorkshire and the first mayor to chair an integrated care partnership, said: “We know exactly why we should be doing more healthcare in communities.”

Coppard believes that greater devolution is needed in order to improve local health outcomes.

“How else can we get that control, that is responsive to local need, back into the system?” he questioned.

There should be a “minimum floor” that all areas should have, paired with devolution that allows specific local needs to be addressed, Coppard believes.

Sampson noted that the conversation needs to be around “negotiating where those minimum lines are.”

“Everybody accepts that it is right for services to be modulated to deal with local need,” Sampson said.

“Equally, we all accept that there are certain minimum things that should be provided nationally, particularly if we’re going to give people a health message about exactly where you go when you have got this type of condition.”

He emphasised: “There are minimum standards. What we’re talking about is negotiating exactly where those lines are.

“In optometry, there is a national approach in Wales and in Scotland that has been highly successful for years. It’s only in England where that’s not good enough, and we’ve got to do it locally. I don’t see it makes much sense.”

Sampson added that the NHS was created in three years – and expressed his view that the Government should be being more ambitious than to aim for 10 years in its reform plans.

“The NHS was created on 5 July 1948 by a government that was not elected until the 5 July 1945,” Sampson said.

“One year to get a piece of legislation through Parliament; two years to face down the concerted opposition of the doctors, and find the money and the infrastructure in a post-war economy. They managed to create the thing in three years.”

He added: “Of course, there are bits that are going to take an awful long time to get right in the NHS, but actually there are bits that you can do quickly, and we should be being more ambitious than to aim for 10 years.”

Taylor also emphasised that further proof of concept is needed if the left shift – the move from hospital to community care – is to succeed.

“We need to think really imaginatively about how we can get proof of concept for the left shift and how we can start that engine up, because at the moment, if anything, we’re drifting slightly rightward rather than leftward,” he said.