Orthoptist at Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

The job at Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Orthoptists diagnose and manage disorders of eye movement, binocular vision and visual development. They test vision in babies and young children who cannot read a letter chart, detect and treat squint and amblyopia using patching, glasses, exercises and prisms, and assess and monitor double vision and eye movement problems after stroke, head injury, thyroid eye disease and neurological illness. Most work in hospital eye departments alongside ophthalmologists and optometrists, and many also run screening and extended-role clinics. Babies, children and adults with squint, amblyopia, double vision, reduced or unstable vision, and patients with stroke, acquired brain injury, thyroid eye disease, glaucoma, diabetes or neurological conditions.

At an acute trust such as Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, that work means an acute hospital caseload — inpatients on the wards, emergency and critical care, theatres and diagnostics, and hospital outpatient clinics, with the working day shaped by admissions, ward rounds and discharge planning. Newly qualified posts here are usually rotational: four to six months at a time in a different clinical area, which is how you find out what you want to specialise in before you commit. Across the profession as a whole, orthoptists work in settings including NHS hospital eye department, paediatric eye clinics, stroke and neuro-rehabilitation units, school vision screening and diabetic eye screening — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £32,073 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in the South East was £39,983 in 2025. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.