This page is the map itself, and the place to get the snippet if you want it on your own site. For the written version — how criteria, prior approval and individual funding requests actually differ, what the Hampshire split means, and what to do if the answer is no — read Is eyelid surgery funded on the NHS?
Start here: it depends which operation
Eyelid surgery is not one thing, and the NHS does not treat it as one thing. Almost every funding argument comes down to whether an operation is treating disease or altering appearance.
Suspected skin cancer is the clearest case
No English Integrated Care Board restricts removing a lesion that might be malignant, and these referrals run on urgent cancer pathways. It is the only procedure on this map given a status without checking each area's policy.
Most eyelid surgery is funded only if you meet criteria
Upper lid blepharoplasty, ptosis surgery, brow lift, chalazion removal, ectropion and entropion repair and surgery for a watering eye can be functional or largely cosmetic depending on severity, so commissioners set a threshold. The last three surprise people: they treat real disease, and most patients who need them will qualify, but several areas publish thresholds anyway. What that means in practice is not that you will be refused, but that the referral has to say the right things.
Some things are not normally funded anywhere
Cosmetic blepharoplasty with no functional problem, eye bags, xanthelasma, and removal of skin tags and small cysts that are not troubling the eye. Exceptions exist where a benign lesion is bleeding, repeatedly infected, obstructing vision, or where the diagnosis is genuinely uncertain. Uncertainty is a clinical reason, not a cosmetic one, and it is worth saying so at referral.
How approval actually works
Criteria based access and prior approval are not the same thing
Under prior approval your clinician must secure funding before you are treated. Under criteria based access the clinician may refer directly, provided the referral letter documents how you meet the published criteria. The map shows the same colour for both, because both are funded when criteria are met, but the action is different, so the panel names the route wherever we know it.
An individual funding request is for people who do not meet the criteria
An IFR argues that your circumstances are exceptional. The bar is deliberately high: you have to show something clinically unusual that distinguishes you from others with the same condition. Being very troubled by the problem is not exceptionality, because everyone applying is troubled by it.
What tends to make an application succeed
For upper lid surgery the single most important thing is objective evidence. Most policies want documented visual field testing in the relaxed position, without compensating by raising the brows. Photographs, a documented history of brow-raising or headaches worsening through the day, and evidence that the lid is resting on the lashes all help. What rarely helps is a referral saying only that the eyelids look tired.
Why so much of the map is grey or hatched green
Solid grey means we have not read that area's policy for that operation yet — not a refusal. Hatched green means we searched and the ICB does not publish any restriction policy for that operation. That usually means it is funded routinely, subject only to ordinary clinical referral, though we will not invent criteria the board has not published. It is not the same as solid green, which means a policy explicitly says the operation is funded.
It would be easy, and mostly correct, to colour everything amber and assume the usual visual field threshold. We do not, because the exceptions are real: Hampshire and Isle of Wight does not routinely fund ptosis or blepharoplasty at all, and the vertical field threshold that looks so standard is written three materially different ways in different policies. A confident wrong answer could stop someone seeking treatment they were entitled to. Grey costs nothing.
Solid grey means not checked yet. Hatched green means no published restriction identified — not refused. Where an area is grey or hatched green, the panel still tells you where its policies are published and what to ask for.
Embed this map
Choose the operation the page is about and the snippet will open the map on it. Keep the line of credit under the frame. That link is the only part of the snippet a search engine treats as a link from the host page — the map inside the frame is invisible to it — and it is the whole reason this map is free to use.