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IN TOUCH – The Court Hearing About Access Services in Supermarkets; Parliamentary Eye Health Event; Swimming

TX:Ìý 25.10.2022Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý Tonight…

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Clip

I’m going to dial it to the more advanced setting now.Ìý

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Ooh yes, now I’ve got a black splodge, everything’s very wavy.

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There are four packets of coffee, can you get the decaff one?

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I mean this just looks like a white bag.

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White

The parliamentary event calling for a national strategy to improve eye health, later, our correspondent Fern Lulham, who you heard there, will be reporting on a drive to get more MPs on board.

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Sellers

I’ve had a few quite bad experiences of men just grabbing hold of me randomly and being like – you shouldn’t be swimming here, you can’t swim in a straight line and really kicking off.

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White

We’ll be hearing what drove this keen swimmer to persuade her local swimming pools to provide a special lane so that she could pursue her sport.Ìý We’ll be reporting on the responses she got – good and bad.

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But first, the latest attempt to try to revive a service which was initially withdrawn because of covid and has only been restored patchily since.Ìý Auriol Britton is one of those visually impaired people who greatly valued the assisted shopping service offered by a number of supermarkets where a member of staff will accompany you around the store to help you do your shop.Ìý But Auriol has experienced repeated difficulty in using the service in her local Bristol branch of Sainsbury’s since covid restrictions are supposed to have been lifted.Ìý So, last week, she went to court and successfully argued that the reasonable adjustments to replace the service were inadequate and Auriol joins me.

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Auriol, first of all, just explain what specifically it was that prompted you to bring this case.

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Britton

Assisted shopping was officially withdrawn by Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd., on the 24th March 2020.Ìý However, it was not available to me after that, officially, for at least 19 months, I next received it again on 9th February 2022.

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White

So, in fact long after covid restrictions were supposed to have been withdrawn?

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Britton

Yes.Ìý Now, unfortunately, despite entering into substantial correspondence with the supermarket, which I have been a customer of for much of my life, attempts to resolve the matter in other ways were not successful.Ìý Sainsbury’s introduced two alternative arrangements during covid.Ìý These were that when people could only shop individually, disabled people were allowed to bring a helper with them.Ìý The second adjustment was, what I call, the remote list method, namely a person could come in with a list, wait while someone went round and got all the goods for them.Ìý Now, as regards bringing someone with you, this was deemed to be asking disabled people to make their own adjustments and as regards to the printed list, there are several choices – if you wanted, say, a savoury pie there will be about four different brands and numerous fillings.

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White

So, the argument is that if you can’t actually go round with the person every time an important choice comes up, you’re not in a position to make it?

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Britton

No, they’d have to keep coming back to you.Ìý Now I proposed an alternative, which I called pass the parcel, which involved shopping assistants wearing PPE and swapping over the assistants after 15 minutes.Ìý The judge deemed that the remote list method wasn’t really a reasonable adjustment because I’d found that it didn’t work but that once social distancing recommendations had been reduced from two metres to one metre plus, that the pass the parcel method would have constituted reasonable adjustment.Ìý Sadly, Sainsbury’s were not willing to try the pass the parcel method.

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White

Now we’ve heard that they offered the system of going round and taking your list round and do it and you’ve explained why that didn’t work.Ìý They’ve also asked people to call ahead to book a time to ensure that they’ve got someone to help.Ìý That’s not unreasonable, is it?

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Britton

No, booking assistance is something which happens in other industries – on the railways, on National Rail, for example.Ìý However, it’s quite difficult to book assistance ahead of time, which I have no objection in principle to doing, if there’s no way of booking it if, for example, the phone isn’t answered or if there’s no booking system.Ìý I’ve had several threats since February this year that I wouldn’t be helped with my shopping.Ìý I think it’s fine to ask people to book in principle but accept that they’re not always going to be able to and you have to have a method of booking, you have to have a booking system, you have to resource it, you have to notify people of it.Ìý Incidentally, during the pandemic, some of your listeners will say – well, why didn’t they just switch to online instead – but we couldn’t get those slots if we weren’t on the government shielding list.

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White

We did invite, of course, Sainsbury’s to come on the programme, they didn’t want to do that but this is what they told us in a statement:

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Sainsbury’s statement

Throughout the pandemic we worked tirelessly in unprecedented circumstances to follow government guidance and adapt our stores and operations to keep everyone safe.Ìý We recognise that in this case the judge ruled our assisted shopping could have been introduced earlier.Ìý We’re in touch with Ms Britton about her assistance needs and look forward to welcoming her back into store soon.

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Auriol, what do you think of that and are you satisfied with the result you got?

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Britton

I am satisfied with the result I got.Ìý For someone who was extremely vocal in the court all morning and kept interrupting the judge, don’t do that, that’s not a good idea.Ìý We need to defend the right of people with disabilities to have the support they need to shop, they don’t need a food parcel, they need the appropriate support to shop and make their own nutritional choices.

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White

Auriol Britton, thank you very much indeed.

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Now for years organisations representing visually impaired people have been calling for better eye care services, more comprehensive checks to prevent avoidable eye disease and solutions to long waiting times for treatment.Ìý Demand for eye services are rising rapidly, with referrals from primary care up 12% since 2014.Ìý The NHS is struggling to keep up and some patients are now on waiting lists for over a year.Ìý It’s against this backdrop that The Eyes Have It, a partnership comprising the Macular Society, Fight for Sight, the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, the RNIB and many other organisations, held a parliamentary drop in event at Westminster last week, the aim to highlight the partnership’s call for a national eye care plan for England to tackle the problems patients are facing in getting the treatment they need.Ìý Fern Lulham was there for us, she began by asking MP Marsha de Cordova, visually impaired herself and hosting the event at Portcullis House, what problems she wanted addressed by a national eye care plan.

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De Cordova

I want to see a clear plan to tackle the backlog in appointments and in terms of the support that people require, so, I want to make sure it’s adequately resourced and there are some clear goals and clear targets set to ensure that people that require support are getting it in a timely fashion.

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Lulham

And you talk about that national plan as recently as July this year, the government rejected the idea of a national plan.

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De Cordova

So, that was back in July, we’ve had a change in leadership and so it’s really going to be down to voices, including myself but also the sight loss sector as a whole, really calling on the government to look at eye care in a different way.Ìý There has to be that buy in at the top.Ìý We have a strategy for strokes, there’s a strategy for dementia, rightly so and I’m not trying to draw any comparisons but it can be done and I think with the will it should be done.

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Lulham

Well, if Marsha was right about that it called into question what practical changes might need to be made on the ground to support it.Ìý Melanie Hingorani is from the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and proved well placed to give me some answers.

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Hingorani

I think we’re in a situation, at the moment, where the hospitals are really overwhelmed with delays and backlogs and yet we have a huge amount of expertise and thousands of professionals in our primary care optometrists and could deliver a lot of the care and relieve that burden but are not joined up in the system properly to do so.Ìý There’s no real sort of clear payment or commissioning route to fund them to be able to do this because they do have to be able to fit this within their business model.

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Lulham

Your website says that over a quarter of consultants are now 55 or over and therefore set to leave the workforce within the next decade and it also says that most units are already reporting unfilled positions, so what needs to be done to tackle this problem and how confident are you that that will happen?

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Hingorani

I don’t think we should continue with the same model.Ìý We’re terribly hospital dependent and we’re also terribly doctor dependent and actually we don’t need to be.Ìý So, there’s a whole range of multi-professional people both in the hospital and in the community, all of whom can do a lot more and work at, what people call, the top of their licence.Ìý In other words, delivering more medical care, even though they’re not a doctor but I think no matter what we do we will need some more doctors and we’ve just got to bite the bullet and do that.Ìý And there are so many different models in terms of things like community diagnostic hubs where patients can come and have high throughput tests and they can then be reported in what’s called a virtual clinic, so the doctor or the decision-making nurse or optometrist can look at the data and make a decision.Ìý A lot of our decisions can be taken on the basis of numerical data, like vision or eye pressure or pictures and scans of the back of the eye, to make their decision.Ìý So, it’s a real way of delivering much greater volume of care and from that route, finding the patients who really do then need to proceed face-to-face.Ìý So, I think we have loads and loads of solutions, the question is how can we pump prime to get those in place because they don’t magically happen, they will create efficiencies but you need some investment and some resource to make a start.

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Lulham

Talking of tech, in one corner of the room at the event, Dr Peter Hampson from the Association of Ophthalmologists was standing with a lot of very technical equipment and gave me an insight into the part it could play in the future of eye care.

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Hampson

So, what we’ve got here is we’ve got an optima, which – the one we’ve got here is just a wide field imaging technology, to get a great big view of the inside of the eye, lets us see far further out than you can just by looking in normally.Ìý But the OCT technology scans through the layers of the retina and lets us spot things like wet AMD and glaucoma quicker and earlier in the process than we would otherwise because actually we can see underneath the retina.Ìý It gives us so much more information, which is always the key.Ìý And from a waiting list perspective, if you walked into a practice and said – oh, my vision’s gone a bit wobbly – there are a number of reasons that could happen and the big scary one is wet AMD, that’s the one that needs treating within two weeks but there are other completely not entirely benign but pretty much benign reasons, so like a little bit of an extra skin on the top of the retina, in that case that could just be monitored, the patient doesn’t need to be worried, they don’t need to go to the eye hospital in most cases.

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Lulham

As well as pressing for action to improve eye care this event also aimed to educate about sight loss.

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Clip

I’m going to dial it to the more advanced setting now.

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Ooh yes, now I’ve got a black splodge.Ìý Everything’s very wavy.

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Lulham

Being registered blind and having very little remaining sight I’m not sure I was the most suitable candidate to try out the virtual reality simulator of eye conditions but hey, what’s life without a challenge?

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Clip

Shall we take you to our supermarket and get you to see the supermarket…

Do you want to go and try and buy some coffee now?

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I would love a cup of coffee, absolutely.

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Well, you know it’s past midday so you should probably stick to decaff…

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That’s very important.

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There are four packets of coffee, can you get the decaff one?

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I’ve located the coffee, that’s an achievement in itself.Ìý I mean this just looks like a white bag, I can’t see anything… I can see a coloured portion, which I’m assuming there’s writing on but I can’t see what the writing says.

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So, do you think that’s coffee?

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It feels more like food.

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Yeah, so that’s some rice.

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Okay, so I definitely don’t want to put that in my hot water.Ìý I’d be having a meal instead of a drink.

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Great, well done.

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White

Fern Lulham reporting and participating.Ìý And next week, we’re going to be talking to Louisa Wickham, who is the first National Clinical Director for eye care in England about her priorities in her new job.

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Now swimming can be a great form of exercise for blind and partially sighted people but swimming pools often not so great.Ìý Swimming in a straight line can be a bit of a challenge, as I’ve discovered myself and it was that which prompted keen swimmer Aletea Sellers to get in touch with us to see if we could help.

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Sellers

Pre-covid you used to just be able to turn up and ask for a sort of single lane, just a private lane that you could swim up and down in and it wouldn’t take up much space, it would literally just be by the wall and you could have a really narrow lane, just big enough for one person.Ìý But sort of post-covid there seems to be a shift, a big shift away from that and they’ve imposed sort of a traffic light system which they haven’t really reversed since covid where you swim up one side of the lane and down the other, which I find really hard.Ìý I mean I do actually swim, I’ve been told, in quite a straight line but if I’m asked to swim in two separate places then I just get really confused and stress quite easily.

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White

So, you think that they are just sticking to the rules that they made during covid without necessarily still needing to do that, perhaps without really thinking about it very much?

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Sellers

Yes, exactly.Ìý I think even if they don’t offer a single lane, maybe it’s not always practical and the shape of the pool, I do understand that sometimes that just makes it a bit more difficult.Ìý But it’s just having that kind of understanding really.Ìý I mean I’m thinking again back to pre-covid and I did used to swim just out in the open with everybody else but even at that point I’ve had a few quite bad experiences of – well, men, just grabbing hold of me randomly and being like – you shouldn’t be swimming here, you can’t swim in a straight line and it can ruin your swim really.Ìý And when you don’t have a dog or cane with you, people – they just never come to the conclusion that you might not be able to see, so it can be difficult.

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White

So, just explain what lengths you’ve gone to try to get them to make what the legislation calls reasonable accommodation?

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Sellers

About a year ago I contacted a couple of swimming pools by phone and sort of said I’d really like to come in and would I be able to have a lane and at that point they both quite firmly said no, it wouldn’t be possible.Ìý And we were still going through, I suppose, the sort of tail end of the covid stuff, so I thought I’d just wait till that calmed down.Ìý And then I got in touch with them again, via email this time, I asked if I could have my own lane and one pool initially didn’t respond but I’ve had a positive response since then but there was another pool who – well they have responded but quite negatively and said that they would not be able to put a lane in and did not offer any other sort of reasonable adjustments or any kind of understanding that I might not be able to swim in the straight line or follow the traffic light system that they’ve imposed.

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White

Alright, let’s give the credit to the one that has been cooperative and I think that’s the Kingstanding Leisure Centre.Ìý Can you tell us what they’ve actually managed to do at your second attempt, as it were, to…

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Sellers

Oh yeah.Ìý I mean I think initially it was just a bit of a misunderstanding because I think it’s –Kingstanding Wellbeing Centre have been fantastic.Ìý They have put a lane in to help me and try to maintain a straight line and I think they’ve done a really good job; their pool wasn’t a standard shape; their staff are aware that I’m visually impaired so I don’t feel the sort of the worry that someone’s going to come out of nowhere and I’m not going to have any back up or support from anybody.Ìý And obviously new to the pool, so they’ve showed me where things are and generally been really, really helpful.Ìý I mean there are certain times to go at but you know I think there are plenty of times where I can go, I don’t feel like I’m limited or restricted.

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White

But there have been others that have either not responded at all or just said a blank no?

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Sellers

Yeah, yeah, it’s very disappointing because the one in question that has responded very negatively was Wyndley Leisure Centre and that is actually based in Sutton Park, where all the Commonwealth stuff was happening in Birmingham.

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White

I should say we have tried to contact them twice, certainly at the time of recording they’ve not come back to us.Ìý Can I just ask you why is it so important to you to keep up your water and swimming skills?

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Sellers

Swimming is one of those sports that actually as a nearly totally blind person you can do without a third person or without an intermediary and it’s so rare to have a sport like that.Ìý I mean I love rowing, rowing is a big sport for me and also I love open water swimming but I have to kind of accept that a third party, to some degree, is necessary when I’m doing things like that.Ìý But pool swimming you can swim completely independently and I feel really sad that maybe blind people don’t know that the option is there to be able to go and swim independently but we shouldn’t have to fight for our right to swim.Ìý What’s the purpose of teaching blind people to swim if you’re not going to allow them to swim with everybody else, there’s just no point otherwise.

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White

Are you going to keep trying because I gather that this isn’t the one that’s closest to your home I gather, the one that have been helpful?

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Sellers

No, I’m going to cut my losses, to be fair.Ìý I appreciate that Kingstanding have been so helpful and I would rather swim somewhere where I feel welcome.

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White

Aletea Sellers, thank you.

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And that’s it for today.Ìý Do let us know your thoughts on anything you’ve heard in tonight’s programme. You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk, leave your voice messages on 0161 8361338 or go to our website bbc.co.uk/intouch.Ìý From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings and studio managers Simon Highfield and Chris Hardman, goodbye.

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