A Message from our founder
The creation of The Retina Clinic London is the result of over 30 years of experience in Ophthalmology and listening to patients’ desires. Our aim is to provide patients with personalised clinical care in a unique and new clinical set-up with an environment that allows for the necessary time to interact with patients in an effective and compassionate manner.
We strive to provide patients with a diagnosis and treatment plan at their first visit by carrying out multimodal testing on site. This reduces the burden of repeat visits for testing and discussion of results, as well as patient anxiety.
Continuity of care is as important to us as it is to our patients. We benefit from a full-time team of experienced reception and administrative staff, nurses, technicians, and clinical trial coordinators who assist us in ensuring that all patients queries are dealt with quickly and efficiently whilst also ensuring no patients are lost to follow-up.
We aim to offer our patients a new and completely different experience to what they are used to from the moment they enter our clinic. A personal touch and confidentiality are paramount to us.
We make sure that we allocate adequate amount of testing and consultation time to each patient. Of course, delays sometimes occur when the complexity of other cases requires extra time or emergencies require unplanned care. However, this does not impact on the time dedicated to each of our patients.
Providing patients with choice, personalised care and treatment are two of our most important aims. Therefore, rather than just following guidelines, we aim to discuss with our patients all available treatment options, their benefits and risks, make the patient part of the decision-making process, and the evaluation of response to treatment.
Patient satisfaction surveys conducted confirm the success of this new holistic approach.
We do not accept medical insurance cover nor do we do NHS contracts. This is because the only way to achieve our unique and personalised care model is to work only on a patient self-funding basis, avoiding the need for GP referrals and time-consuming approvals by providers of medical insurance. This model benefits patients by reducing the number of visits required to reach a diagnosis, as medical insurance providers usually do not cover for multiple tests to be done in one visit. However, the most important reason for our business model of choice is that medical insurance companies set their own fees for tests and treatments without considering how this impacts the care that doctors can give to patients to ensure that their own businesses remain viable. In this manner, we have decided to surpass this issue entirely by removing any reliance on private medical insurance companies.
We focus on innovation, the development of new diagnostic and treatment devices, and work in the development and application of new outpatient and surgical therapies & technologies to improve the eye health of patients.
Our patient population consists of either self-funding patients that continue to fund themselves their treatment long-term or patient that attend at no cost as part of clinical trials.
As a clinic, we try to benefit patients by removing the boundary between research and clinical care. Therefore, we offer all eligible patients with participation in our program of clinical trials.
When diagnosis and treatments are delivered at our clinic through clinical trials, patients receive care at no cost with travel and accommodation expenses within the UK covered by the sponsor of the clinical trial and within limits depending on the trial.
We aim to provide faster access to the results of translational research and the latest and most innovative treatments. As we offer patients the possibility of integrating research as part of their clinical care, they can benefit from new treatments prior to their commercial approval.
The Retina Clinic London is a self-contained state-of-the-art private institution with on-site operating theatre and the most advanced diagnostic and imaging technology, including amongst others, artificial intelligence, adaptive optics, widefield OCT, ultra-widefield imaging with navigated peripheral OCT and electrophysiology.
There is a successful track record of on-site clinical trials, both investigator-led and industry sponsored including in, amongst others, gene therapy surgery and retinal and vitreous laser. The clinic also has a long-standing and successful track record of collaborating with the R&D teams of various imaging and surgical device manufacturing companies in the development and testing of prototypes and newly approved technologies.
The Retina Clinic London team is routinely invited to present at national and international meetings and publishes in peer-reviewed journals. This ensures that our results available to our colleagues and patients.
We trust that you will enjoy and benefit from our care.
We look forward to seeing you and taking care of your eye health.
Best wishes,
Prof. Paulo-Eduardo Stanga
Director and Lead Vitreoretinal Surgeon