Over the past few weeks, we have highlighted the delays patients at York District Hospital face for an operation to remove cataracts.

Hundreds of people are on the waiting list. It takes an average of 17 weeks for an outpatients appointment and almost a year to have the surgery.

The only quick part of the process is the operation itself. It takes 20 minutes, and the patient can be home the same day.

And what a difference that day makes. Cataract sufferers regularly refer to their almost instant restoration of sight as a miracle.

As one member of the medical team said: "We don't save lives here. But we do save quality of life."

It is wrong that so many people have to wait so long to undergo this modern medical miracle.

It is unfair that patients elsewhere in the country receive treatment in half the time. But it is nobody's fault.

No one can blame the dedicated staff at the hospital's eye unit. They are working flat out to help sufferers.

Every day they are faced with heart rending decisions.

The director of the unit, Dr Mike Hayward, wrote in the Evening Press last month about the difficulty of deciding who deserved priority treatment.

Dr Hayward and his team can do no more. But they could with greater resources and better facilities.

The eye unit is cramped and overcrowded; a long-term solution to the problem would be to build a new outpatients' eye clinic.

Hospital bosses, who are looking into the idea, have put a £1 million price tag on the unit and would therefore need approval from North Yorkshire Health Authority.

It is being stressed that the scheme is in its earliest stages.

Health chiefs are right to take their time over the decision.

They have to weigh up the expense of a new eye unit against many other competing needs.

Other patients are on even longer waiting lists than the one for cataract surgery.

The eye unit is certainly not the only department to struggle in a 1990s working environment designed for 1970s demand. York District Hospital's entire future on its present site must now be under consideration.

But it is important that the inadequacy of the present eye unit is now being publicly acknowledged and a solution sought.

The anguish of cataract sufferers needs to be addressed.

Hospital managers and regional health chiefs must work together to find a way to perform their miracles more often.

see NEWS 'See Sense: York hope for eye clinic to cut operation queue'

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