Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that clinicians in emergency and urgent care settings receive adequate training in the recognition and management of hamstring avulsion injuries.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Regulated healthcare professionals need to meet the standards of proficiency, conduct, and performance set by the relevant professional regulator, which are independent of the Government. It is the responsibility of individual employers to ensure their staff have appropriate access to ongoing training and professional development to provide safe and effective care.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of guidance for NHS trusts on the urgent provision of MRI scans for patients with hamstring avulsion injuries.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Decisions on the need for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in the case of hamstring avulsion injuries are clinically led. The Department has not made an assessment of the adequacy of the relevant guidance.
The hamstring injury page on the NHS.UK website was recently reviewed against the latest clinical evidence and updated in July 2025. The current page does alert users to the potential for a hamstring injury to be severe and require surgery, and where and when to get medical help. NHS England routinely updates the NHS.UK website in line with clinical evidence to ensure individuals with a potential hamstring injury are provided with the latest clinical evidence.
The Department is committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including for MRI. NHS England is taking steps to support MRI services to remain resilient, effective, and able to meet growing demand. Over the past five years, significant capital investment has been deployed to strengthen service resilience, increase capacity, and improve patient access. This has included funding for new MRI assets, upgrading existing machines with MRI acceleration software, and supporting trusts in replacing failing or outdated systems.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26, some of which will deliver new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if his Department will review information on the NHS website regarding hamstring injuries to ensure it adequately reflects the potential severity of hamstring avulsion injuries and the possible need for surgical intervention.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Decisions on the need for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in the case of hamstring avulsion injuries are clinically led. The Department has not made an assessment of the adequacy of the relevant guidance.
The hamstring injury page on the NHS.UK website was recently reviewed against the latest clinical evidence and updated in July 2025. The current page does alert users to the potential for a hamstring injury to be severe and require surgery, and where and when to get medical help. NHS England routinely updates the NHS.UK website in line with clinical evidence to ensure individuals with a potential hamstring injury are provided with the latest clinical evidence.
The Department is committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including for MRI. NHS England is taking steps to support MRI services to remain resilient, effective, and able to meet growing demand. Over the past five years, significant capital investment has been deployed to strengthen service resilience, increase capacity, and improve patient access. This has included funding for new MRI assets, upgrading existing machines with MRI acceleration software, and supporting trusts in replacing failing or outdated systems.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26, some of which will deliver new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to increase MRI scanning capacity in the NHS.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including investment in new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. This will speed up waiting times for tests, a crucial part of reducing overall waiting times and returning to the referral to treatment 18-week standard.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26 to support delivery of the NHS performance standards. This funding will deliver new community diagnostic centres, including new MRI scanners, new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software.
Further details and allocations will be set out in due course.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential impact of the nationalisation of Northern Rail on punctuality, reliability, and frequency of service; and whether any improvements have been identified that can be used to improve wider nationalisation of the rail industry.
Answered by Keir Mather - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
My Department has regular discussions with Northern Trains, as with all publicly owned operators, to ensure it remains focused on reducing train service cancellations and providing a reliable, predictable train service for customers. As part of this, we share success between operators so each one can assess how it could build on others’ good practice to improve its services.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
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 ensure parity of funding and service provision between physical health services and mental health services.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are committed to giving mental health the same attention and focus as physical health. We know that, for people living with severe mental illness, life expectancy is 15 to 20 years shorter than that for the general population.
As the Medium-Term Planning Framework makes clear, we need a new approach for mental health, to drive down waits, improve the quality of care, and increase productivity of mental health services. Funding is a key part of this. We have set out that over the next three years, integrated care boards will be required to meet the mental health investment standard by protecting mental health spending in real terms. In other words, rising in line with inflation from 2026/27.
The 10-Year Health Plan sets out our vision for the neighbourhood health service. This is about bringing care into local communities, convening professionals into patient-centred teams, ending fragmentation, and abolishing the National Health Service default of ‘one size fits all’ care. Through six pilot sites we are testing 24/7 neighbourhood mental health centres. These provide round the clock, open-access to treatment and support for adults with severe mental health needs, and we are now looking to roll the model out more widely. The centres will work in close partnership with primary care to provide wraparound support for service users.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many of the places intended to be filled by the Government's Golden Hello Scheme for NHS dentists have been, and what work the Government will be doing with local ICBs to ensure that they hit more of their targets.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are continuing to recruit dentists through the Golden Hello scheme. The scheme offers a £20,000 recruitment incentive payment to dentists to work in those areas that need them most. The scheme remains a national priority.
Golden Hello data will be published this year and will consist of data showing the regional distribution of the original allocation of posts and the number of posts recruited to at both a national and regional level.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to a) make the Psychotherapeutic Counselling Core pilot training pathway permanent and b) increase the number of places available through the pathway.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Psychotherapeutic Counselling Core training pathway is no longer a pilot and is a part of NHS England’s regular commissioning cycle for the education and training programmes. There are no plans to increase the number of training places on the Psychotherapeutic Counselling Core training pathway.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to review the amount of hours of training that newly qualified counsellors and psychotherapists have to complete before being eligible to work in the NHS.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
It is the responsibility of individual employers to set any specific requirements for their roles and to ensure staff meet patient safety, clinical quality, and professional competence.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has made a recent assessment of the potential impact of the repairs backlog at Stepping Hill Hospital on patient care and waiting times; and if he will make an estimate of the potential cost to the public purse of meeting those repair costs in the next three years.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We have inherited a broken National Health Service, with many hospitals in a state of disrepair, and patients unable to access the care they need. We recognise that hospitals across the country, including Stepping Hill, have challenging and poor-quality infrastructure. Repairing and rebuilding our healthcare estate is a vital part of our ambition to create an NHS that is fit for the future through our 10-Year Health Plan.
We are working to rebuild the health service. We are backing the NHS with over £4 billion in operational capital in 2025/26, with a further £16.9 billion to be allocated to integrated care boards (ICBs) and providers over the following years. Providers have also been given further five-year operational capital planning assumptions, covering 2030/31 to 2034-35, allowing them to plan longer term with confidence and accelerate investment decisions aligned to local priorities, including repairs and maintenance.
In addition, we will provide £30 billion across five years, namely 2025/26 to 2029/30, in day-to-day maintenance and repair of the NHS estate, with a further five years of funding certainty for estates maintenance as set out in the 10 Year Infrastructure Plan. Within this, the Estates Safety Fund, established in 2025/26, will continue, providing £6.75 billion investment over the next nine years to target the most critical building repairs. The £2.5 million allocated to Stepping Hill hospital from the Estates Safety Fund in 2025/26 is the first step in addressing the repairs backlog at Stepping Hill Hospital.