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 variations in the number of people assessed as eligible to receive continuing healthcare funding in different regions of the UK.

There will always be some variation across clinical commissioning groups in NHS Continuing Healthcare eligibility, due to a wide variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the age dispersion within the local population and variations between geographical areas in terms of their level of health need.

NHS England has an assurance mechanism in place to hold all non-compliant clinical commissioning groups to account and will continue to regularly monitor the effectiveness of its assurance processes. NHS England is developing an enhanced methodology to identify outliers to take account of variation that can be attributed to population-based factors.

The Department published an updated National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare and National Health Service-funded Nursing Care on 1 March 2018, to be implemented on 1 October 2018. The update incorporates a new structure that is intended to provide greater clarity and help reduce variation in its application.