Specsavers' autumn plans to keep politicians focused on community healthcare

Following its strong 2024 campaign pushing for pathway change in NHS primary care hearing services for adults, the retail giant Specsavers has an autumn plan to stay in the faces of politicians across the UK political spectrum, targeting party conferences with a firm message on its current and future role in delivering “an accessible neighbourhood health service” within the NHS.

The Specsavers team, which includes clinicians, will be staffing a stand at the Conservative and Labour annual gatherings – respectively October 5 to 8 in Manchester, and September 28 to October 1 in Liverpool – and will have a presence at the Liberal Democrat party conference, up first from September 20 to 23 in Bournemouth.

The stand at the Tory and Labour events will feature hearing and eye health checks, plus an interactive map setting out the provision of NHS-commissioned services to “highlight the current postcode lottery in England in particular”.

There will also be Specsavers-sponsored fringe events at the Labour conference, their aim being to bring together leading figures from politics and healthcare to discuss the role of community audiology and optics.

Parliaments targeted in Scotland and Wales, which hold elections in 2026

Current Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting, Specsavers points out in a press release on its plans, has set out a vision of a neighbourhood health service. While this includes a shift from hospital to community, illness to prevention, and analogue to digital, it varies significantly from the transformative hearing health role for community audiology envisaged by the optics and audiology group’s 2024 Hearing Health Report, which called directly for a nationally commissioned audiology service for adult primary care that private businesses such as Specsavers would be validated to apply universally.

Such a straight-up demand seems to be relaxed in Specsavers’ 2025 approach. Streeting’s January 2025 policy paper on Hearing Aids in the UK was something of an arresting surprise within a long-term plan for the NHS, firmly backing OTC product, and is still a fresh, ambiguously wide-ranging, and relatively firm piece of policy within a wobbly administration, a landscape in which Streeting himself was being regarded as a candidate for deputy leadership of his party, a race the Health Minister declined to enter, regarding a female deputy as necessary. A ten-year plan just beginning does not encourage advocacy on audiology aspects that may be seen, within the entire health panorama, as minor.

Neither does the possibility of looming political change provide encouragement to dive straight in: Specsavers points out that Scotland and Wales “will also be holding parliamentary elections next year, where health is likely to dominate the agenda”.

Benefits for patients, politicians will hear

Gordon Harrison, Director of Audiology Professional Advancement, Specsavers.
Courtesy of Specsavers

Gordon Harrison, Director of Professional Advancement in Audiology at Specsavers, stated: “The health service is very much in the spotlight, following the Westminster government’s publication of its ten-year plan for health. It is vital to engage with decision-makers as this plan takes greater shape.”

“We believe that community audiology and optometry is critical to delivering an accessible neighbourhood health service,” added Harrison.

“We’ll be talking to MPs and delegates at the conferences about the life-changing work being done already. Plus, setting out how fully using the skills of our clinicians will deliver even more benefits for patients and the health service,” he continued.

Source: Specsavers