Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he plans to take to ensure that Community Diagnostic Centres are accessible to everyone in (a) Birmingham Erdington constiituency and (b) England.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC) programme now delivers activity on 168 sites across the country, and data published in August 2024 showed CDCs have delivered over 10.4 million diagnostic tests since July 2021.
The National Health Service has endeavoured to ensure that each integrated care system (ICS) has at least two CDCs, and there is now a standard or large model CDC approved in every NHS integrated care system area. Locations of CDCs were determined based on a set of specific criteria, including need for diagnostic provision, accessibility for patients by private and public transport and factors which would support health inequalities.
Whilst there is no CDC located in the Birmingham Erdington constituency, Birmingham and Solihull ICB hosts three CDCs in the local area, including Washwood Heath CDC in Saltley, North Solihull CDC in Chelmsley Wood and South Birmingham CDC in Maypole. CDCs provide additional, digitally connected, diagnostic capacity in England, which supports existing diagnostic capacity, including at acute sites such as at Birmingham Heartlands Hospital.
NHS England is also supporting systems to make a wider range of direct access tests available to general practices (GP) nationally and in Birmingham, through the GP Direct Access Scheme. This includes via direct referrals to CDCs, than need for a pre appointment and to increase speed of access. Phases 1 and 2 of the GP Direct Access Scheme are focussed on expanding use of direct access tests for cancer and respiratory conditions, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The Government has committed £1.5 billion of capital funding for new surgical hubs and diagnostic scanners. This will build capacity for over 30,000 additional procedures and over 1.25 million diagnostic tests, as well as new beds which will create more treatment space in emergency departments, reduce waiting times, and help shift more care into the community. More details will follow in due course.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
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 support (a) Birmingham Erdington constituency and (b) other areas covered by the Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board to address the barriers to respiratory diagnostics identified in the report entitled Right Test Right Time, published by Asthma and Lung UK in August 2023.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne
In addition to the development of community diagnostic provision, on Monday 4 November the Birmingham Solihull Integrated Care Board (ICB) launched a system-wide campaign to encourage people to ‘breathe easy’ by getting their vaccines. Focusing primarily on flu, COVID-19, and the respiratory syncytial virus, the Breathe Easy campaign was designed to engage with people who are over 65 years old and living in the postcodes where it is known that vaccine uptake is low, as well as those who are aged six months to 64 years old and who have an increased risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 because of a health condition or treatment. The ICB is also urging pregnant women who are between 28 and 32 weeks of their pregnancy to ensure they are doing all they can to protect themselves and their unborn baby.
Radio, bus stop, bus interior, community radio, billboard, online, and supermarket adverts are all currently live, and will run until Christmas 2024. This campaign forms part of the integrated care system’s winter communications plan, which has been developed to bring partners together across the system to help create a movement asking people to take personal responsibility, drive action, increase trust in community health services, and educate, to prevent ill-health and ultimately protect the health of yourself, others, and the local National Health Service.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
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 tackle rates of respiratory-related hospital admissions in Birmingham.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne
System partners are working collaboratively to improve pathways between health care professionals, and to remove barriers in referrals to community-based services and hospital acute setting clinics. This will support admission avoidance, and ensure that patients are receiving the right care in the right place, more quickly.
An example of this is the work between the West Midlands Ambulance Service University NHS Foundation Trust (WMAS) and urgent community response, who are supporting the WMAS with direct referrals into their service, and providing a call before you convey the telephone line for ambulance clinicians on the scene with patients. Increasing the workforce skill mix in the urgent community response to support with decision making will avoid admissions. Support to care homes to ensure they can safely monitor and escalate, where patients become unwell, to appropriate health care professionals has been supported by urgent community response teams and virtual ward teams. We are also improving respiratory virtual ward utilisation in collaboration with both the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and the Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
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 increase the capacity of secondary care to support primary care with essential respiratory diagnostics.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne
Following a significant drop in the volume of spirometry during the pandemic, NHS England has already worked with a range of partners, including Asthma and Lung UK, the British Thoracic Society, the Association of Respiratory Technology and Physiology, and clinical leads to develop a package for systems containing the information and support required to help increase the number of people receiving early and accurate diagnosis for respiratory disease.
NHS England’s priorities and operational planning guidance for 2024/25 also highlights the importance of timely access to diagnostics, including spirometry, asking systems to utilise new diagnostic capacity in the community to commission these tests. Additional funding has been made available to systems in 2021/22, 2022/23, and 2023/24 for the training and accreditation of staff in the provision and interpretation of quality assured spirometry, a key component of an early and accurate diagnosis. In 2023/24 and 2024/25, the national team is financially supporting systems to take innovative approaches to expanding access to their diagnostic services, focusing particularly on addressing health inequalities.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
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 spirometry testing is (a) funded and (b) available in areas covered by the Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne
Spirometry testing is provided at the Washwood Heath Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC), along with other respiratory diagnostic tests such as fractional exhaled nitric oxide and lung function tests. The same tests will also be available at the North Solihull and South Birmingham CDCs when they go live next year. Mobilisation meetings are underway with the provider to establish that these services are ready to go live.
All tests and funding seen in the CDC have a tariff attached to them, which incentivises systems to develop diagnostic pathways, including for respiratory health, that take place in the community. These tests are local, accessible, and offer timely appointments. There are now three CDCs approved in Birmingham and Solihull, which shows a system shift to a community-based delivery model for all diagnostics, and spirometry testing is key to diagnosis a number of conditions affecting a large number of the local population.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
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) include spirometry and FeNO testing in the GP contract and (b) to provide dedicated funding through a Directed Enhanced Service.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Currently there are no plans to include spirometry and FeNO testing in the GP contract. In many areas, spirometry and FeNO testing services are delivered through Local Enhanced Services (LESs), which are funded separately to global sum payments.
Integrated care boards, as commissioners of primary care, are responsible for commissioning LESs which practices can opt into, which vary in scope and funding to fit the needs of local areas. In areas where spirometry and FeNO testing are not commissioned through a LES, it is the commissioner’s responsibility to ensure these services are available to patients.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department are taking to reduce ambulance waiting times in (a) the West Midlands and (b) Birmingham, Erdington constituency.
Answered by Helen Whately - Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Our Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services sets out the range of measures being taken to achieve our ambition of reducing average Category 2 ambulance response times to 30 minutes across 2024/25, including in the West Midlands and Birmingham. Information on the delivery plan is available at the following link:
Ambulance trusts received £200 million of additional funding in 2023/24, to increase deployed hours and reduce response times. We will maintain this additional capacity this year, alongside the 5,000 additional permanent hospital beds delivered last year to improve patient flow through hospitals, and reduce ambulance capacity lost to ambulance patient handover delays.
Since we published our plan, there have been significant improvements in ambulance response times, including in the West Midlands. In 2023/24, average Category 2 ambulance response times in the West Midlands were over twelve minutes faster compared to the previous year, a reduction of 25%.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that all people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer who are eligible for clinical trials are able to access those trials.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
The Government has set out a vision for the Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery, which aims to create a patient-centred, pro-innovation, and digitally enabled clinical research environment. Key to achieving this vision is increasing participation in research to ensure that the research we support is inclusive and representative of the populations we serve.
The Department-funded National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funds research and research infrastructure which supports patients and the public to participate in high-quality research. For example, in financial year 2022/23, the NIHR Clinical Research Network supported 41 pancreatic cancer studies and recruited 1,004 participants to these studies.
In addition, the NIHR provides an online service called Be Part of Research which promotes participation in health and social care research by allowing users to search for relevant studies and register their interest. This makes it easier for people to find and take part in health and care research that is relevant to them.
When designing research studies, researchers consider inclusion and exclusion criteria carefully to ensure they are not unnecessarily excluding specific groups who would benefit from the outcome of their study. However, we are aware that inclusion and exclusion criteria can disproportionally exclude individuals from specific groups, for example older adults or pregnant women.
The Health Research Authority (HRA) is developing guidance to improve practices in this area. We are not aware that people with pancreatic cancer are routinely being excluded from studies, however, we know that sometimes people are automatically excluded from taking part, and this can be for good reasons. The guidance produced by the HRA will help researchers to consider if these people and any other groups of people may be unnecessarily excluded, and consider putting measures in place to address this.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions she has had with NHS England on the impact of staffing on the (a) National Cancer Patient Experience Survey programme and (b) collection of data on people with pancreatic cancer.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
We are not aware of an impact of staffing on the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey programme, or on the collection of data on people with pancreatic cancer.
The Department is working closely with NHS England to make sure we have the right workforce with the right skills, across the country. In 2023, the National Health Service published the first ever Long Term Workforce Plan, backed by over £2.4 billion of Government funding, to deliver the biggest training expansion in NHS history. Regarding cancer specifically, the number of staff in the cancer workforce has increased by 50% since 2010.
The 2022 National Cancer Patient Experience survey showed respondents’ average rating of care was 8.8 out of 10, with zero being very poor and 10 very good. 75.5% of respondents said they definitely received the right amount of support for their overall health and wellbeing from hospital staff.
Asked by: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)
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 to help ensure that cancer waiting time targets are met in (a) Birmingham Erdington constituency and (b) England.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
Reducing cancer treatment waiting times is a priority for the Government. The Department is working jointly with NHS England on implementing the delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlogs in elective care. The Government plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to help drive up and protect elective activity, including cancer diagnosis and treatment activity.
In the 2023/24 Operational Planning Guidance, NHS England announced it is providing over £390 million in cancer service development funding to cancer alliances to support delivery of the strategy and the operational priorities for cancer which includes increasing and prioritising diagnostic and treatment capacity for cancer.
Additionally, the Government published the Major conditions strategy case for change and our strategic framework on 14 August 2023 which sets out our approach to making the choices over the next five years that will deliver the most value in facing the health challenges of today and of the decades ahead, including for cancer.