Disability Aids: Waiting Lists
(asked on 13th March 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the waiting times for the provision of disability equipment, such as a) wheelchairs, b) hoists and c) grab rails.
Not all of the data requested is held centrally. Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning services to meet the health needs of their local population, and responsibility for providing equipment and wheelchairs to disabled people typically falls to local authorities and the National Health Service.
Local authorities in England have a statutory duty to make arrangements for the provision of community equipment for disabled people in their area. Responsibility for managing the market for these services, including commissioning and oversight of delivery, rests with local authorities. The NHS is responsible for providing wheelchairs for people with longer-term, complex needs.
The Medium Term Planning Framework, published in October 2025, requires that from 2026/27 all ICBs and community health services must actively manage and reduce the proportion of waits across all community health services over 18 weeks and develop a plan to eliminate all 52-week waits. These targets will guide systems to reduce longest waits.
NHS England is supporting ICBs to reduce regional variation in the quality and provision of NHS wheelchairs, and to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment. This includes publishing a Wheelchair Quality Framework on 9 April 2025, which sets out quality standards and statutory requirements for ICBs, such as offering personal wheelchair budgets.
Since July 2015, NHS England has collected quarterly data from clinical commissioning groups, now ICBs, on wheelchair provision, including waiting times, to enable targeted action if improvement is required.
In Quarter 3 of 2025/26, the proportion of patients whose episode of care was closed in the reporting period and prescribed equipment was delivered within 18 weeks or less was 79% for children, up from 77.7% in Quarter 2, and 83.1% for adults, down from 84.1% in Quarter 2.
The following publications and data sources provide some relevant information about disability equipment, but this is not a complete picture.
Firstly, the Acute discharge situation report: technical specification, regarding equipment and associated training not yet delivered, for pathways one to three. The patient requires equipment in order to allow them to be discharged. This has been requested by the care transfer hub but not yet provided, or further training for formal or informal carers is required before it can be safely used. This publication is available at the following link:
Secondly, the Intermediate care data collection – technical guidance, where intermediate care is a collective term for short-term interventions that aim to maximise people’s independence and quality of life following or during a period of illness. It includes ‘step-down’ services after discharge from an episode of acute care to support recovery and ‘step-up’ services to avoid admission to hospital. Intermediate care commonly involves rehabilitation, reablement, and recovery support, and can be provided in a person’s home or in a community bedded setting. This publication is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/intermediate-care-data-collection-technical-guidance/