Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on diabetic retinopathy and referral levels in the English National Health Service Diabetic Eye Screening Programme.

AimsThe aim was to determine the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on diabetic retinopathy and referral rates in the English National Health Service (NHS) Diabetic Eye Screening Programme (DESP).MethodsNon-patient identifiable data are submitted centrally from the 57 regional centres in the NHS DESP on a quarterly basis and analysed using STATA, comparing 01/04/2019-31/03/2020 and 01/04/2021-31/03/2022. Patient characteristics were analysed from National Diabetes Audit (NDA) data.ResultsThere were 2,274,635 grades from the 57 centres in 2019-2020 and 2,199,623 grades in 2021-2022. The proportion of eyes with referable DR increased from 3.1% in 2019-2020 to 3.2% in the 2021-2022 NHS year (p