Shaping the Future of Local Eye Care: LOCSU Launches Ambitious Three-Year Strategy
27 May 2025
At NOC25, CEO Janice Foster launched LOCSU’s 2025 – 2028 strategic plan, ‘LOCs: Shaping the Future of Local Eye Care’. The strategy is centred around three pledges to enhance, enable, and empower a unified LOC community to lead change and improve population health.
The strategy draws on two years of consultation and collaboration with LOCs, together with detailed analysis of the changing healthcare environment. It identifies how LOCSU will support LOCs to increase their impact, driving the sustainable solutions and radical innovation needed to meet national and local eye care challenges.
The new strategy is driven by LOCSU’s strategic mission: to be an essential central hub and resource, directly supporting operations of individual LOCs and optimising collaboration across a community of LOCs, toinfluence and increase effective, sustainable services, delivered by local primary care contractors and performers to improve eye health outcomes for people in England.
Three Core Pledges
Pledge 1: Enhance LOC Operations
The Enhance pledge provides support to LOCs in the running of committees and eliminating duplication, ensuring LOCs save time, money and resources.
This pledge commits to training and development opportunities to aid with LOC succession planning, ensuring efficient committees and developing LOC leaders of the future.
Pledge 2: Enable LOC Influence
The Enable pledge provides LOCs with the expertise and knowledge required to influence local service commissioning, in particular supporting population health management and strategic commissioning.
This will strengthen LOC voices in ICB negotiations, help LOCs tailor powerful templates to local service provision needs, and underline both the national expertise and local impact the sector delivers.
Pledge 3: Empower LOC Strategy Development
The Empower pledge supports LOCs to prepare for the future, to anticipate and lead change, and seize opportunities to position optometry at the forefront of evolving healthcare priorities. LOCSU will support this ambition through arming LOCs with data and research through an accessible central knowledge hub, identifying upcoming changes and challenges while seeking to involve LOCs early in discussions through proactive strategy development.
This will lead to innovation and growth through evidence-backed planning, stronger collective influence, and a future-ready approach with a high profile for local optometry.
Call to LOCs
The underpinning actions of each pledge ensure that every LOC is supported, enabling them to help shape the future of local eye care.
While launching the strategy at NOC25, 86% of respondents indicated they will be using two or more of the pledges within the next year. LOCSU CEO, Janice Foster, called on all LOCs to consider how they will actively engage to take advantage of the efficiencies, expertise, and resources to deliver tangible impact and better eye care.
Summing up the ambition and focus of the strategy, Janice says: “In developing this strategy, we listened closely to LOCs to understand not just the pain points and obstacles they face, but also their ambition and vision for their role in healthcare transformation.
“We have taken a bold and positive strategic approach. We have sought to alleviate problems, accelerate insight, and drive knowledge-sharing so all LOCs can operate, influence, and implement effectively.
“We will move forward together as an LOC community, united for impact.”
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