Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many unborn babies have received surgery for open spina bifida; and how much money has been spent on those surgeries since the introduction of the open spina bifida surgery in 2018.
NHS Digital data collection for open repair of spina bifida in a fetus was introduced from 1 April 2020. However, finalised Hospital Episode Statistics data is only available up to March 2020, so we are unable to provide this information.
NHS England and NHS Improvement commissioned a United Kingdom-wide ‘Open fetal surgery to treat foetuses with open spina bifida’ service since November 2019. Since the start of the service to the end of July 2020, surgery has been undertaken on 13 unborn babies and the total cost of these surgeries was £164,021.