We’re very proud of our excellent patient outcomes and the quality of our NHS services, and we’re happy to share our performance data to reassure patients that the success and safety rates of our NHS cataract surgery are some of the best in the UK.
Our teams are committed to providing high-quality patient care, following best practice guidelines and continually assessing and improving our services to deliver the best possible results to our patients.
SpaMedica is proud to support the Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ (RCOphth) National Ophthalmology Database (NOD) Audit, which enables cataract surgery providers to benchmark the performance of their surgeons against their peers nationally. This gives SpaMedica a good indicator of the high-quality surgery that we’re performing.
SpaMedica was the first independent eye hospital group to provide NHS cataract surgery data to the NOD Audit and our data is collated, along with data from 79.9% of NHS cataract operations performed in England and Wales, in a comprehensive report that provides key performance indicators of surgical quality.
Visual Outcomes
98.10% of SpaMedica patients achieved visual acuity of 6/12 or better after cataract surgery.
6/12 is the minimum vision standard required for driving a car in the UK – this means that you can read from 6 metres what someone with standard vision could read from 12. This is half the distance, hence the 6/12 (or referred to as 0.5).
Low Complication Rates
A key indicator of quality in cataract surgery is a provider’s Posterior Capsule Rupture (PCR) rate. PCR is a complication that may occur during surgery when the capsular bag that holds the lens breaks.
We are pleased to report that SpaMedica has a current average unadjusted PCR rate of 0.49% – meaning 99.51% of our surgeries are complication-free.
This indicates that SpaMedica patients are less than half as likely to experience a PCR complication during cataract surgery (based on the national unadjusted average of 1.5%).
0.001% of our patients experienced endophthalmitis after surgery (an infection of the tissues or fluids inside the eyeball).
We always listen to our patients and value their feedback on our services. This helps us identify where we are performing well and which areas we need to improve. Based on feedback from over 15,000 cataract patients collected during the 2023/24 NHS reporting year:
Our feedback questionnaire asks patients to rate their quality of life before and after cataract surgery. Quality of life is measured by their general sense of happiness and ability to perform normal, day to day tasks. Quality of life is scored from 1 (very poor quality) to 5 (very good quality).
The average quality of life rating from patients before cataract surgery was 3.2/5. Post-surgery, the average was 4.6/5. The adjacent graph illustrates how cataract surgery improves our patients’ quality of life.
Everything you need to know about your surgery/treatment, including what to expect when you visit your SpaMedica hospital for the first time.
With over 40 specialist eye hospitals across the country - and more scheduled to open next year - there's bound to be a SpaMedica near you.