Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if the Government will commit to fully funding the Workforce Implementation Plan to tackle shortages in the breast cancer workforce.
Answered by Steve Brine
My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has commissioned Baroness Dido Harding, working closely with Sir David Behan, to lead a number of programmes to engage with key National Health Service interests to develop a detailed workforce implementation plan. These programmes will consider detailed proposals to grow the workforce rapidly, including the breast cancer workforce, consider additional staff and skills required, build a supportive working culture in the NHS and ensure first rate leadership for NHS staff.
Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he is taking steps to exempt people with diagnosed long-term mental health illnesses from prescription charges.
Answered by Steve Brine
The Department has no current plans to amend the list of medical conditions that provide exemption from National Health Service prescription charges, as extensive arrangements are in place to ensure that people, including those with mental health illnesses, can access affordable prescriptions.
Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has for the future roll-out of the National Bereavement Care Pathway; and whether he plans to expand that roll-out.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
All bereaved parents, following baby loss, should be offered the same high standard of care and support in an appropriate environment. The Government committed full funding of over £100,000 for the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death charity (Sands) to continue the roll-out of the National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) in 2018/19. This builds upon £50,000 of start-up funding.
This funding has enabled Sands to actively support 32 NHS trusts and foundation trusts to implement the NBCP over the past two years. An evaluation of Wave 1 implementation found that 94% of parents who received bereavement care in the period the NBCP was used felt that all staff could provide a consistently high level of care and 98% felt they were treated with respect. We would encourage all services caring for parents who experience baby loss to adopt the NBCP. Care providers can access all of the NBCP standards, pathway materials and training resources via the following link:
The Department’s Business Planning process takes place annually. Expenditure, including any awards made through grant funding, cannot be confirmed until the Business Planning process has been concluded and budgets for the relevant financial year approved.
Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to support local authorities and hospitals providing support to people with autism.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The NHS Long Term Plan was published on 7 January 2019. The Plan has a renewed focus on supporting people with learning disabilities, autism or both by improving diagnostic pathways, reducing over-prescribing of medicines, and by ensuring people have access to high-quality care and support in the community.
The fifth local authority autism self-assessment exercise opened in September 2018 and closed in December 2018. The data received is currently being analysed by Public Health England and a report will be published shortly.
Work is underway by Health Education England to develop an Autism Core Skills and Competency Framework for health and care staff, and staff in organisations with public facing responsibilities. The aim is for the Framework to be completed by July 2019.
On 13 February, we began a consultation on proposals for mandatory learning disability and autism training for staff in health and social care, to ensure staff have the right skills to support people who may need reasonable adjustments made to allow them to access care.
NHS England and NHS Digital are strengthening accessibility through a reasonable adjustment ‘flagging’ project, which will provide a flag on the Summary Care Record to indicate the support needs and associated reasonable adjustments that an individual requires. The NHS Long Term Plan commits that by 2023/24 this will be used in patient records.
Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to introduce routine screening in pregnancy for Vasa Praevia.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
There are currently no plans to introduce routine screening in pregnancy for vasa praevia.
The United Kingdom National Screening Committee (UK NSC) reviewed antenatal screening for vasa praevia in 2017 and recommended that a population screening programme for vasa praevia should not be offered. This is because there is not enough evidence to suggest that screening every pregnancy for vasa praevia would provide more benefit than harm.
Due to the uncertainty of whether screening all women is the best approach or whether it would be better to test smaller groups of women whose pregnancies are known to be at higher risk of vasa praevia, the UK NSC convened a multidisciplinary group to model the potential impact of some vasa praevia detection strategies. This work will be completed in spring 2019.
The UK NSC will review the evidence for vasa praevia in 2020/21 or earlier in light of new published peer reviewed evidence.
Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
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 effect of the level of inflation on the cost of providing services in nursing homes.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The Government took account of inflationary pressures, including any effects on the cost of providing nursing care, in determining the overall settlement for adult social care at the last Spending Review in 2015.
Asked by: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the effect of the UK leaving the EU on the availability of Keppra for people with epilepsy.
Answered by Steve Brine
The United Kingdom’s position on medicines regulation remains clear. We want to retain a close working partnership with the European Union to ensure that medicines remain available to UK patients in a safe and timely manner. We have been clear that this involves us making sure our regulators continue to work together, as they do with regulators internationally. As the Prime Minister has said, we intend to to explore with the EU the terms on which the UK could remain part the European Medicines Agency.
Until we can be certain of the outcome of Brexit negotiations our duty as a responsible Government is to prepare for all eventualities, including ‘no deal’. On 23 August 2018, therefore, the Department wrote to all pharmaceutical companies that supply the United Kingdom with prescription only or pharmacy medicines from, or via, the European Union/European Economic Area, asking them to ensure they have a minimum of six weeks’ additional supply in the UK, over and above their business as usual operational buffer stocks, by 29 March 2019 in the event of a no-deal scenario.
Since then, we have received very good engagement from industry who share our aims of ensuring continuity of medicines supply for patients is maintained and able to cope with any potential delays at the border that may arise in the short term in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
We understand that the medicine Keppra is important to many people in this country. However, the Department recognises that through its medicines supply contingency programme it is requesting sensitive commercial information from pharmaceutical companies. To reassure participating companies, we have committed to treating all information received confidentially, securely and to using it only for the purposes of the Department’s programme. That means not introducing information about a company, specific medicine or their supply routes into the public domain.