Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment has been made of the potential merits of providing training to mental health teams on support to children with lifelong speech and language difficulties.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department of Health and Social Care is working closely with the Department for Education and NHS England to improve access to community health services, including speech and language therapy, for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
In addition to the undergraduate degree route, speech and language therapists can now also train via a degree apprenticeship. This route is going into its fourth year of delivery and offers an alternative pathway to the traditional degree route into a successful career as a speech and language therapist.
In partnership with NHS England, the Department for Education has extended the Early Language and Support for Every Child programme, trialling new ways of working to better identify and support children with Speech, Language and Communication Needs in early years settings and primary schools.
At the Spending Review, we confirmed that we will deliver on our commitment to recruit an additional 8,500 mental health workers by the end of this Parliament, roll out mental health support teams to cover all schools in England by 2029/30 and expand NHS Talking Therapies and Individual Placement and Support schemes.
We have also already started piloting Neighbourhood Mental Health Centres. These pilots aim to provide open access care for anyone with a severe mental illness 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our aim is to have one Neighbourhood Health Centre in each community that brings together National Health Service, local authority and voluntary sector services in one building to help create a holistic offer that meets the needs of local populations including children with lifelong speech and language difficulties.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of delayed access to specialist heart valve treatment has on (a) avoidable unscheduled hospitalisations, (b) deaths on waiting lists and (c) other patient outcomes.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
No specific assessment has been made of the potential impact of delayed access to specialist heart valve disease (HVD) treatment on avoidable unscheduled hospitalisations, deaths on waiting lists, or other patient outcomes.
Cutting waiting times, including for cardiology services, is a key priority for the Government. The cardiology waiting list decreased from 412,164 in September 2024 to 393,400 in September 2025, although this data includes estimates for missing data.
Cardiology is a priority specialty for significant transformation, as outlined in the Elective Reform Plan. The ambition is, where possible and clinically appropriate, to increase specialist care closer to home, and outside of hospitals so that hospital capacity is freed up, enabling patients' timely access to care, as well as improving outcomes.
NHS England has committed to optimising pathways of care for patients with HVD, including earlier detection and improved treatment pathways. To achieve this, the NHS England Cardiac Programme has established an expert advisory group and carried out work including, in 2024/25, providing targeted funding for pathway improvement projects. These included projects that focussed on improving referral processes and local diagnostic pathway provision, as well as fast-tracking patients on valve disease pathways.
To accelerate progress towards the Government’s ambition to reduce premature deaths from heart disease and stroke by 25% within a decade, we will publish a new cardiovascular disease modern service framework in 2026.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether NHS England has made an estimate of the number and proportion of women diagnosed with severe symptomatic aortic stenosis who receive timely treatment compared to men.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The following table shows the count of elective hospital admissions where there was a primary diagnosis of 'aortic stenosis', by patient gender, as well as the median duration from the receipt of referral by the hospital to admission for 2022/23 to 2024/25:
Year | Gender | Total admissions | Number of admissions with a valid waiting time | Median time to admission (days) |
2022/23 | Male | 6,072 | 5,193 | 48 |
2022/23 | Female | 3,600 | 3,073 | 44 |
2023/24 | Male | 6,126 | 5,364 | 47 |
2023/24 | Female | 3,695 | 3,259 | 46 |
2024/25 | Male | 6,615 | 5,822 | 43 |
2024/25 | Female | 4,105 | 3,623 | 42 |
Source: Hospital Episode Statistics, NHS England.