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Glaucoma Awareness Week

Glaucoma Awareness Week takes place from
6 – 12 July 2026.

This Glaucoma Awareness Week, we are launching our National Patient Voices Survey. 

Glaucoma care in the UK is evolving fast, with new plans to reduce backlogs, expand community-based care, and integrate new technologies.

Those plans are quite different across the four nations, resulting in a ‘postcode lottery’ for people living with glaucoma.

Increasing variability in where and how treatment is received has made the eye care landscape overly complex and difficult to navigate. And there is a risk that patient views and fears may go unheard in the noise of the system.

In response, we’re launching a National Patient Voices Survey in July 2026 with the aim of collecting over 10,000 opinions.

The responses will be shared with those devising policy, making decisions and providing treatment.

The project will talk to diverse communities, analyse data, and turn insights into a national report that drives real change.

You can learn more about the survey here.

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Help us start the conversation about glaucoma

If you’re living with glaucoma, we need your help to encourage your family and friends to attend sight tests every two years.

Glaucoma can be treated. The earlier it is detected, the more successful the treatment is likely to be in controlling it and preventing sight loss. Most people with early glaucoma have no symptoms. That’s why it is so important to ensure that your relatives have regular eye examinations. They might even be entitled to a free NHS-funded sight test.

Conversations about your glaucoma diagnosis can be daunting. But we’re here to support you every step of the way. Call our helpline team if you’ve got any questions or concerns.

If you’d prefer to get the conversation about glaucoma going in a more informal way, why not try some of these ideas out:

Share your story

If you’d like to help us increase awareness of glaucoma to the public by sharing your story for use on our digital channels, send us a message at marketing@glaucoma.uk

Email us

Glaucoma Awareness Week: what, when, who and why?

Glaucoma Awareness Week usually takes place in the last week of June each year.

What is Glaucoma Awareness Week and why does it matter?

Glaucoma Awareness Week is an annual awareness-raising opportunity where we encourage people across the UK to talk about glaucoma. Around 1.1 million people in the UK currently have glaucoma. Half of them don’t know they have it. We want to end preventable glaucoma sight loss and that starts with raising awareness of the disease.

When is it?

Glaucoma Awareness Week takes place on 6 -12 July 2026.

Who coordinates it?

Glaucoma Awareness Week is coordinated by us, Glaucoma UK. But it wouldn’t be possible without the people who come forward to give a face to our campaign and give a voice to the different experiences of the growing number of people in the UK with glaucoma. You can meet some of the amazing people who have shared their stories with us on our Your stories page.

Highlights from past years

Our previous campaigns have reached hundreds of thousands of people through radio, TV, social media, podcasts, digital billboards and more. Some highlights include:

  • Know your risk online tool: We launched an interactive quiz to help people understand their glaucoma risk and encourage eye tests. We had over 3,000 quiz completions at launch, with coverage in The Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times (21 million combined readership) and 321,742 reached on social media.
  • Glaucoma in families: We focused on the fact that glaucoma runs in families, asking people to get to know their own family eye health history by talking to their loved ones. We reached 321,742 social media users and secured 21 hours of radio time across a wide network of stations.
  • What glaucoma means to patients: We invited everyone to share their unique experiences by completing the sentence, “My glaucoma…” We appeared on two TV stations that have a weekly regional audience of 656,250, supported by a radio day across 126 stations and over 150 digital billboards all over the UK.
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