Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, when NHS England plans to consider mechanical thrombectomy for the treatment of stroke in its specialised commissioning prioritisation process.
Answered by David Mowat
As yet, there are insufficient patients being treated with mechanical thrombectomy to assess its impact on processes, such as length of hospital stay and bed occupancy rates, outcomes of care and the effect on post stroke rehabilitation.
However, the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme is now collecting data on patients treated with mechanical thrombectomy and the results will be reported as soon as it is feasible. Sufficient cases will need to be undertaken before conducting the necessary statistical analyses and reporting the data.
NHS England is considering whether mechanical thrombectomy should be an area covered by its specialised commissioning portfolio and work is underway on this.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether he plans to support the Department of International and European Affairs of the German Ministry of Health's draft resolution on sepsis for the World Health Assembly General Assembly meeting in 2017.
Answered by Philip Dunne
The Department is committed to improving diagnosis and management of sepsis and has a wide programme of work underway. We will consider the German Ministry of Health’s draft resolution to the World Health Assembly in due course.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to his Department's evaluation of the autism awareness project, what measures his Department plans to use to demonstrate (a) how many more people understand autism as a result of that project and (b) its overall value for money.
Answered by David Mowat
After a public tendering process, the Autism Alliance UK were successful in receiving funding from the Department for their Connect to Autism project. This project has focused on improving awareness and understanding of autism in the general population by working with local and national providers of services in the private, public and voluntary sectors. A tendering process to evaluate the project will be undertaken shortly, with the evaluation aiming to identify, amongst other outcomes, how many people the awareness project has reached and its overall value for money.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the announcement in paragraph 1.97 of the March 2016 Budget, on funding for child prosthetics, (a) by what mechanisms people can access, (b) who is able to apply for, (c) what the criteria is for accessing, (d) how many people have received and (e) who is responsible for distributing such funding.
Answered by Alistair Burt
The Department is currently working on plans for how best to distribute the £1.5 million of funding for child prosthetics and will set out comprehensive details once the plans are finalised.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 24 May 2016 to Question 37620, whether the information requested in that Question is collected centrally by the NHS Commissioning Board.
Answered by Alistair Burt
NHS England does not collect data on the average time taken for autism diagnosis by age and gender. At a local level data is usually monitored by commissioners. Some limited local data on autism diagnosis is asked for as part of the Autism Self-Assessment Exercises overseen by Public Health England. The results of the last exercise were based mainly on 2014 data and can be accessed at:
www.improvinghealthandlives.org.uk/projects/autsaf2014results
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress NHS England has made on including an indicator in the Mental Health Services Data Set recording a diagnosis of autism; and when data collection of such diagnoses is planned to commence.
Answered by Alistair Burt
NHS England has been working with the Health and Social Care Information Centre to develop reporting from the new Mental Health Services Data Set. This mandatory data set includes provision for the diagnosis of autism to be recorded, and reporting on this data has been prioritised. We expect experimental data reports on the number of people diagnosed with autism to be published by the end of 2016.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average time taken for autism diagnosis was by age and gender at time of diagnosis for each year from 2013.
Answered by Alistair Burt
We do not centrally collect data from the National Health Service on waiting times for an assessment of autism.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence clinical guideline on autism diagnosis states that a diagnostic assessment should start within 12 weeks of referral.
NHS England and the Association of Directors of Social Services have undertaken a series of visits to clinical commissioning groups to identify best practice on diagnosis and support.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans he has to create a Best Practice Tariff or similar sustained improvement incentive for sepsis.
Answered by Ben Gummer
In 2015/16, NHS England introduced an incentive payment (a national Commissioning for Quality and Innovation measure) to encourage the timely recognition and treatment of sepsis for emergency admissions. In 2016/17 this was extended to include in-patients who deteriorate in hospitals. NHS England will continue to review the best way of incentivising high performance in recognising and treating sepsis promptly and appropriately.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is planning to take to improve professional awareness of sepsis.
Answered by Ben Gummer
Plans for improving professional awareness of sepsis were set out in the Cross System Sepsis Board report Improving outcomes for patients with sepsis: A cross-system action plan published by NHS England in December 2015.
Health Education England (HEE) has undertaken to extend the scope of its learning materials to focus on sepsis in primary care and in children.
Building on the 25 eLearning sessions currently available from e-Learning for healthcare that include sepsis as a topic, a new module will focus on the identification and management of sepsis in primary care.
HEE is also working on a short educational video on paediatric sepsis. Finally, HEE is undertaking a piece of scoping work to identify the current provision of learning materials available to support sepsis management and any gaps in this material.
Asked by: Cheryl Gillan (Conservative - Chesham and Amersham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans he has to launch a public awareness campaign for sepsis.
Answered by Ben Gummer
Public Health England has been asked to take forward a national awareness campaign to help parents spot the signs of sepsis, alongside other infections such as meningitis and septicaemia. They will be working with the National Health Service and other partners to ensure the plans are evidence based and effective.