Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the implications for her policies of the report by Together for Short Lives entitled The deep disparity in NHS funding for children who need hospice care, published on 13 December 2023.
Answered by Helen Whately - Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
The Government recognises that access to high-quality, palliative and end of life care can make all the difference to individuals and their loved ones. The commissioning of children and young people’s palliative and end of life care services is the statutory duty of integrated care boards (ICBs). ICBs must commission palliative and end of life care services in response to the needs of their population, provided by a range of local organisations with the experience and skills to meet those needs.
Whilst the majority of palliative and end of life care is provided by National Health Service staff and services, we recognise the vital part that voluntary sector organisations, including hospices, also play in providing support to people at end of life and their families. Most hospices are charitable, independent organisations which receive some statutory funding for providing NHS services. The amount of funding hospices receive is dependent on many factors, including what other statutory services are available within the ICB footprint. Charitable hospices are autonomous organisations that provide a range of services which go beyond that which statutory services are legally required to provide. Consequently, the funding arrangements reflect this.
Due to the way the hospice movement organically grew, hospice locations were largely not planned with geographic or demographic purposes as a driving force. Therefore, there are inequalities with access to hospice services, especially for those living in rural or socio-economically deprived areas. It is therefore vital that hospices and statutory services work together to provide ensure their populations have access to palliative and end of life care when they need it.
At a national level, in line with the NHS Long Term Plan commitment, NHS England (NHSE) has provided circa £12 million match-funding to participating ICBs (and formerly clinical commissioning groups) between 2020/21 and 2023/24 which committed to invest in children and young people’s palliative and end of life care, including children and young people’s hospices, giving a total investment of £24 million. In addition, NHSE supports palliative and end of life care for children and young people through the Children and Young People’s Hospice Grant. NHSE has confirmed that it will be renewing the grant for 2024/25, once again allocating £25 million grant funding for children’s hospices using the same prevalence-based allocation approach as in 2022/23 and 2023/24. This prevalence-based approach ensures funding matches local need.
NHSE’s palliative and end of life care team has recently engaged with 24 ICBs to understand how to better support commissioners and has also reviewed all 42 ICB Joint Forward Plans for their inclusion of palliative and end of life care, with 69% of those plans making a specific mention. Further analysis is ongoing, but the intention is to use this information to help shape and focus support to ICBs.
Palliative and end of life care has been added to the agenda for Regional Quality and Performance meetings. Additionally, NHSE has commissioned the development of a palliative and end of life care dashboard, which brings together all relevant local data in one place. The dashboard helps commissioners understand the palliative and end of life care needs of those their local population, including the ability to filter the available information, such as by deprivation or ethnicity, thereby, enabling ICBs to put plans in place to address and track the improvement of health inequalities.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate her Department has made of the number of closures of community pharmacies in the current Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework period.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
The NHS Business Services Authority publishes official statistics which includes the number of pharmacies opening and closing in each financial year. The following table shows how many pharmacies opened or closed within the last five years:
Financial Year | Pharmacies opened | Pharmacies closed |
2018/2019 | 220 | 347 |
2019/2020 | 239 | 405 |
2020/2021 | 236 | 451 |
2021/2022 | 308 | 418 |
2022/2023 | 297 | 388 |
Community pharmacies are private businesses that receive funding to provide pharmaceutical services for the National Health Service. The decision to close, divest or consolidate is a commercial decision made by the business owner. The Department is monitoring changes to the market closely. Access remains good, with 80% of people in England living within a 20 minutes’ walk from a local pharmacy, and with twice as many pharmacies in deprived areas.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she plans to increase services offered by community pharmacies.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
Pharmacies across England, including in Knowsley, can already choose to deliver a wider range of NHS funded services including for example providing advice on newly prescribed medicines for long term conditions, blood pressure checks, oral contraception consultations and minor illness referrals from GPs, NHS111 and Urgent and Emergency Care. Early in 2024 we will expand the NHS funded service offer in community pharmacy and launch Pharmacy First. The service will enable community pharmacists to manage seven common conditions including the supply of prescription-only medicines without a prescription from a GP. The seven conditions are: sinusitis, sore throat, earache, infected insect bite, impetigo, shingles and uncomplicated urinary tract infections in women.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the potential implications for her Department's policies of trends in the level of demand for pharmacy services during winter 2023-24.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
Every year in winter, demand for services in the National Health Service increases and community pharmacies are playing a growing role in supporting the NHS to meet this demand. Pharmacies in England already deliver a wider range of NHS services including advice on newly prescribed medicines for long-term conditions, blood pressure checks, oral contraception consultations and minor illness referrals from general practitioners (GPs), NHS 111 and urgent and emergency care. We are investing in community pharmacy to enable them to support more patients in winter by launching Pharmacy First this year. Pharmacy First will enable community pharmacists to manage seven common conditions including the supply of prescription-only medicines without referring them on to a GP for a prescription
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether her Department has carried out analysis on the long-term financial viability of community pharmacies.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
NHS England has commissioned an economic analysis of the cost of providing pharmaceutical services. That analysis is ongoing and will inform any future decision on the funding of community pharmacies.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans does her Department have to increase public awareness of the Pharmacy First scheme.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
The launch of Pharmacy First early in 2024 will be supported by a public-facing mass media campaign to help raise awareness of Pharmacy First in England.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the implications for her Department's policies of the Public Services Committee report entitled Homecare Medicines Services: an opportunity lost, published on 16 November 2023.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
NHS England has been carrying out a desktop exercise to review homecare medicines services. The next steps are to bring together data from the desktop exercise with the House of Lords inquiry report recommendations to shape a programme of work on homecare medicines. The Department is carefully considering all the conclusions and recommendations made in the report and will respond in due course.
The Department is required to publish a response to the report by 16 January 2024.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Public Services Committee report entitled Homecare Medicines Services: an opportunity lost, published on 16 November 2023, whether her Department will review the regulatory regime for homecare medicines services.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
NHS England has been carrying out a desktop exercise to review homecare medicines services. The next steps are to bring together data from the desktop exercise with the House of Lords inquiry report recommendations to shape a programme of work on homecare medicines. The Department is carefully considering all the conclusions and recommendations made in the report and will respond in due course.
The Department is required to publish a response to the report by 16 January 2024.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help tackle inequalities in prostate cancer outcomes.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
The Department is not currently taking specific steps with Cabinet colleagues to help tackle inequalities in prostate cancer outcomes, but is tackling inequalities for all cancer outcomes. Experience and access is a key focus for everyone as part of the NHS Long Term Plan. The NHS Long Term Plan states that ‘where appropriate every person diagnosed with cancer will have access to personalised care, including needs assessment, a care plan and health and wellbeing information and support’.
A pancreatic cancer clinical audit, led by the Royal College of Surgeons, began in 2021, with the first outcomes expected in 2024. A key aim of the audit is to support National Health Service services to stimulate improvements in cancer detection, treatment and outcomes for patients, including improving survival rates.
Asked by: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the press notice entitled Biggest prostate cancer screening trial in decades to start in UK published on 19 November 2023, what assessment her Department has made of the additional workforce capacity that will be required to deliver the trial.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
The Department funds research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). NIHR invests in the research delivery workforce, the facilities and capacity to support clinical trials. The NIHR Clinical Research Facilities and Experimental Cancer Medicine Centres support the delivery of early phase trials and the NIHR Clinical Research Network and Patient Recruitment Centres support delivery and participation in later phase clinical trials. The prostate cancer trial announced on 19 November will be run by Prostate Cancer UK with the Government contributing alongside others.
To maximise research participation, the NIHR provides the online platform ‘Be Part of Research’, which allows users to search for and register their interest in participating in the clinical trials of most interest and relevance to them. NIHR has also supported initiatives to increase diagnosis rates and participation in prostate cancer research by men from black and minority ethnic groups.
The recently announced TRANSFORM trial aims to save thousands of men each year by finding the best way to screen for prostate cancer. The trial will be United Kingdom-wide, although final decisions on specific locations are yet to be taken. Men will be invited to participate via their general practices. This study will also aim to address some of the inequalities that exist in prostate cancer diagnosis today by ensuring that one in 10 of the trial participants will be black men, who are three times overrepresented compared to the population of men aged 45 to 75 as based on 2021 census data.
The UK National Screening Committee will be reviewing the evidence that is published by this study. This will help to inform any future recommendation on creating a national screening programme for prostate cancer.