Sight loss community health profile

Sight loss community health profile

Overview

The sight loss community health profile has identified and summarised the national and local evidence concerning the health, lifestyle behaviours and wider determinants of health that affect those living with sight loss.

Although the focus of this report was health inequalities among those living with sight loss in Birmingham, the limited available information on health inequalities has resulted in data being used from the UK and internationally, where available.

Community definition

The International Classification of Diseases classifies the degree of vision loss into two groups, distant and near vision impairment. The classifications use ‘visual acuity’ which is the ability of your eyes to distinguish between objects from a specific distance.

2A: Near visual impairment

  • Near visual acuity worse than N6 or M.08 at 40 centimetres.

2B: Distant visual impairment (at 6 meters)

  • Mild: visual acuity worse than 6/12 to 6/18.
  • Moderate: visual acuity worse than 6/18 to 6/60.
  • Severe: visual acuity worse than 6/60 to 3/60.
  • Blindness: visual acuity worse than 3/60.

For more information on the definitions of sight loss, visit the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) website.

To see how visual acuity and eye health is often measured, download a ‘Snellen Chart’ example.

Population size

1 in every 5 people in the UK will live with some degree of sight loss in their lifetime. The IAPB estimates that 4.3 million people currently have some degree of sight loss in the UK (6.4% of total population), of which 170,000 are blind.

The Royal National Institute for Blind people (RNIB) provides the following estimates of sight loss numbers in:

England

  • Mild sight loss: 1,190,000.
  • Moderate sight loss: 411,000.
  • Severe sight loss: 245,000.
  • Total: 1,840,000 (3.2% of the total population).

Birmingham

  • Mild sight loss: 18,500.
  • Moderate sight loss: 6,380.
  • Severe sight loss: 3,710.
  • Total: 28,600 (2.5% of the total population).

Health and wellbeing

You can learn more about the health and wellbeing needs, and the identified health inequalities among those living with sight loss by reading the sight loss community health profile report.

The full profile report does not yet include analysis from the 2021 census. This will be updated at a later date.

Available resources

To support in your understanding of health inequalities among those living with sight loss, we have produced several resources including:

View all sight loss community health profile downloads

Webinar

Watch our webinar which provides a summary of the demographics and key health inequalities among those living with sight loss.

You can switch on subtitles once you have started to play the video. A menu will appear on the video screen.

Page last updated: 9 April 2024

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