- Medically Reviewed by: Mr Mfazo Hove, Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
- Author: Mr Mfazo Hove
- Published: September 15, 2026
- Last Updated: September 14, 2026
TL;DR: During ESCRS London 2026, a 22-strong delegation of Chinese cataract and refractive surgeons left the congress to spend an afternoon at Blue Fin Vision® on Harley Street. The return visit continued a relationship built during my time in China and created an opportunity to exchange ideas about cataract surgery, clinical systems and patient care.
The welcome prepared for the Chinese Refractive Cataract Expert Delegation, 12 September 2026.
Twenty-two colleagues arrived at 22A Harley Street on the Saturday afternoon of ESCRS congress week. A clinic briefing, a tour of the building, an exchange of gifts, and then dinner together at 34 Mayfair. Every one of them held a congress pass. The programme at ExCeL was in full flow, with much of the most interesting work in European ophthalmology being presented a few miles east. They chose to spend the afternoon on Harley Street instead.
It is worth pausing on what that means. Congress week is the one week of the year when international ophthalmology comes to you. Every instrument maker, every lens platform and every technique with a following has a stand, a symposium or a wet lab. Time is the scarcest commodity in the building, and everyone attending has flown a long way to spend it. Nobody gives away an afternoon lightly.
A delegation does not leave a congress programme, cross London and give that afternoon to a working clinic unless a relationship already exists. That choice is the story. The rest of this post is really an account of how the relationship was built, what the afternoon actually contained, and what both sides took from it.
The Chinese Refractive Cataract Expert Delegation with the Blue Fin Vision® team.
The Other Half Of The Sentence
In April I travelled to China: a faculty lecture in Changsha, the ZEISS Horizon meeting in Shanghai, teaching in Hangzhou. I have written about those visits separately and will not retell them here.
What matters for this post is the direction of travel. In the spring, the visiting was ours. We were the guests, welcomed with a generosity I still think about, shown surgical departments running at a scale that has no real equivalent in Europe. This September, the direction reversed. We went to them in the spring. They came to us during ESCRS. Reciprocity is the whole sentence, and it only needs saying once.
The delegation were cataract and refractive surgeons from hospitals across China, drawn from provinces the length of the country, and every one of them operating on ZEISS platforms in their own units.
Some run departments whose weekly cataract volume exceeds what many UK units perform in a quarter. They had spent the week at ExCeL examining technology. They came to Harley Street to examine something a congress stand cannot show: a system.
How a consultant-led independent practice in the UK is organised, staffed, audited and run, from the first phone call to the final post-operative review.
What The Afternoon Actually Was
Not a photo opportunity. The core of the visit was a working briefing on how the practice functions.
How a patient moves through the building, and why the pathway is arranged the way it is. How diagnostics feed surgical planning, and which measurements are repeated rather than trusted once.
How a small clinic audits its outcomes, contributes them to national reporting, and publishes them where patients can see them. How a surgical day is paced, and what that pacing protects.
Then the tour, floor by floor: consulting rooms, the diagnostic suite, the spaces where patients wait and the spaces where they are counselled. And then questions, a great many of them, translated back and forth and losing nothing in the process.
They were the kind of questions that only come from surgeons who operate at serious volume themselves. How long do you spend with a patient before surgery? Who does the counselling, and who takes consent? What happens when a patient is anxious on the day? Who answers the phone at nine in the evening? None of these questions is about equipment. All of them are about culture.
The clinic briefing, delivered to colleagues from across China.
Walking the delegation through the clinic: how a consultant-led practice runs day to day.
And hospitality, because hospitality is evidence. It tells a visitor whether a clinic is a set of rooms or a culture. The table was laid before the first guest arrived: canapés from a kitchen we trust, champagne on ice, juices for those who preferred them, and a gift bag for every visitor.
None of it was elaborate. All of it was deliberate. The standard you set for guests is the standard you have already set for patients, and experienced clinicians read a building the way the rest of us read a menu. They notice everything.
That same instinct runs through the practice. If Blue Fin Vision® chooses to offer something, the aim is not simply to provide it, but to build the infrastructure around it properly: whether that means continuity of care, surgical enhancement pathways, in-house vitreoretinal support or long-term monitoring after treatment. Hospitality is only the most visible expression of a much wider culture.
Canapés prepared for the afternoon.
The welcome table at 22A Harley Street.
Gifts, Both Ways
On our side, the way we like to mark a surgical day: Bollinger for our guests, and chocolates for every visitor to take home. It is a small ritual with a serious origin. In this practice, the end of a good list has always deserved marking and extending that ritual to guests felt like the most honest way of showing them who we are.
On theirs, a gift that stopped the room. A scroll reproduction of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, the great Song dynasty panorama of city life along the Bian River, and one of the most treasured works in the history of Chinese art.
It was presented with a formality that made the respect behind the gesture unmistakable, and a scroll of this kind is given to be unrolled. So we unrolled it, at reception, metre after metre, the whole delegation watching the city unfold: boats, bridges, markets, hundreds of small lives in ink. It was one of the quieter privileges of the week, and it now has a home in the practice.
Marking the day: Bollinger on ice for our guests.
Blue Fin Vision® gifts waiting at reception.
Along the River During the Qingming Festival: the scroll presented by our guests.
Who Made It Possible
Visits like this are built by people, and they deserve naming. Janet, Stephen and James at ZEISS China planned the delegation’s London week and accompanied them throughout, managing everything from translation to timing with complete professionalism. Jun-Suk Lee, Felix Thiemer and Charlie Reed commissioned the film about our practice that began this thread of conversations in the first place.
A visit like this does not happen because two parties admire each other from a distance. It happens because specific people decide it should, and then do the unglamorous work of making it real.
For industry partners, reliability matters in both directions: if colleagues are being brought halfway around the world to visit Blue Fin Vision®, they should know that what awaits them will reflect well on everyone involved.
Industry facilitation is part of the truth, and I am glad to say so plainly. ZEISS opened the door. The clinic was the visit.
What We Exchanged That Was Not In A Bag
The most valuable hour of the afternoon was comparative. China now delivers cataract surgery at extraordinary scale, and its national cataract surgical rate is still rising as access widens across provinces and the population ages.¹ ²
The UK works differently: far lower absolute volume, but a mature culture of national audit in which cataract outcomes across the profession sit within a shared, published database that any surgeon can be measured against.³
Neither system is a template for the other. Both produce excellent surgeons. Putting the two side by side in one room, with enough time and careful translation to let the detail through, is how you discover what each takes for granted.
So we compared workflow. How a surgical list is built, and how far in advance. Who counsels the patient, who takes consent, and how long a surgeon actually has with each person before the day of surgery.
In a department performing hundreds of cataract operations a week, the answers are necessarily different from ours, and the discipline required to keep quality stable at that volume is something British surgeons genuinely admire.
In a consultant-led practice like ours, the same hours are spent differently: fewer patients, more time with each, continuity from first consultation to final review with the same surgeon throughout. Neither model is morally superior. They are answers to different questions.
We compared expectation. What “premium” means to a patient in Hangzhou is not quite what it means to a patient in Marylebone, and the difference is only partly economic. It is also about what patients have been taught to ask for, how much they expect to participate in lens selection, and what they believe surgery owes them afterwards.
And we compared the softer craft around surgery, the counselling and the reassurance, because anxiety before cataract surgery is universal even when everything else differs, and managing it well is as much a part of the operation as anything done under the microscope.⁴
With the world’s ophthalmologists distributed very unevenly against need, exchange of this kind is not a luxury. It is how the profession keeps learning from itself.⁵
“We went to China in the spring. They came to Harley Street during ESCRS. That is the relationship.”
Not A Photograph. A Return Visit.
The afternoon ended where good afternoons should, around a dinner table. At 34 Mayfair the conversation carried on for hours, less structured and better for it: family, training, the surgeons who taught us, the differences between our health systems that no lecture ever quite captures. By the end of the evening the delegation were no longer visitors being hosted. They were colleagues at dinner.
The photographs from the day are lovely, and I have shared some of them here. But the photographs are not the point. The point is that a conversation which began in Changsha, Shanghai and Hangzhou in the spring continued in Marylebone in the autumn, in person, with time given freely in the middle of the busiest week in European ophthalmology. Relationships in medicine are built exactly this way: slowly, reciprocally, and face to face.
London to China. Ophthalmology without borders.
For colleagues visiting London, Blue Fin Vision® is at 22A Harley Street and the door is open. For patients considering cataract or lens surgery, a consultation is the right first step.
References
- Wang W, Yan W, Fotis K, Prasad NM, Lansingh VC, Taylor HR, Finger RP, Facciolo D, He M. Cataract surgical rate and socioeconomics: a global study. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2016;57(14):5872-5881. PubMed
- Song P, Wang H, Theodoratou E, Chan KY, Rudan I. The national and subnational prevalence of cataract and cataract blindness in China: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Glob Health. 2018;8(1):010804. PubMed
- Day AC, Donachie PHJ, Sparrow JM, Johnston RL. The Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ National Ophthalmology Database study of cataract surgery: report 1, visual outcomes and complications. Eye (Lond). 2015;29(4):552-560. PubMed
- Nijkamp MD, Kenens CA, Dijker AJ, Ruiter RA, Hiddema F, Nuijts RM. Determinants of surgery related anxiety in cataract patients. Br J Ophthalmol. 2004;88(10):1310-1314. PubMed
- Resnikoff S, Lansingh VC, Washburn L, Felch W, Gauthier TM, Taylor HR, Eckert K, Parke DW, Wiedemann P. Estimated number of ophthalmologists worldwide (International Council of Ophthalmology update): will we meet the needs? Br J Ophthalmol. 2020;104(4):588-592. PubMed
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Mfazo Hove
Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
MBChB MD FRCOphth CertLRS
Mr Mfazo Hove is a Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon with experience spanning more than 57,000 procedures. He completed 6.5 years of specialist training at Moorfields Eye Hospital and served for five years as a consultant at the Western Eye Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. He is the founder of Blue Fin Vision®, a consultant-led private ophthalmology practice operating across London, Essex, and Hertfordshire. His clinical expertise encompasses advanced cataract surgery, refractive lens replacement, laser vision correction, and implantable Collamer lenses (ICL).
A ZEISS Key Opinion Leader, Mr Hove is a respected international speaker with five invited engagements across seven cities in 2026:
- ZEISS China tour (Changsha, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, April – ZEISS APAC User Meeting)
- RCOphth Annual Congress – May – Manchester
- ZEISS EMEA User Meeting (Istanbul)
- ZEISS Lausanne User Meeting (Lausanne)
- European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons Annual Congress (ESCRS, London)
