Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent steps he has taken to ensure that data on cases of FGM are collected and made public.

The Department’s Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Prevention Programme with NHS England introduced the first ever FGM data collection across the National Health Service, published quarterly by NHS Digital as an official statistic on the NHS Digital website.

The data is collected by healthcare providers in England including acute hospital providers, mental health providers and general practitioner practices. It mandates clinicians to record patient demographic data, specific FGM information, referral and treatment information.

The information is being collected to gain a clearer national picture of the prevalence of FGM and to deepen the health sector’s understanding of the practice. It is also used to inform how NHS England and other sectors provide services for women and girls with FGM, and to indicate national trends.

To improve rates of compliance with the enhanced dataset, NHS Digital analyse the reports to follow up with trusts who are not submitting data, to improve the completeness of the collection. NHS Digital also issued a Data Provision Notice on 25 November under the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to communicate more clearly the requirement to comply with the dataset and set out its benefits. In addition, we continue to work with the Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, the British Medical Association and others to further improve compliance.