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 the planned efficiency savings of £855 million from the NHS Continuing Healthcare budget will be achieved without restricting access to care.

NHS England’s NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC) Strategic Improvement Programme (SIP) aims to provide fair access to NHS CHC in a way which ensures better outcomes, better experience, and better use of resources.

The SIP will not change the threshold for eligibility for NHS CHC, which is based on a multidisciplinary assessment of needs as set out in the National Framework for NHS CHC and NHS-funded Nursing Care, together with secondary legislation to give statutory effect to the eligibility criteria and the decision-making processes.

There should be no quota or cap on access to CHC funding and the programme does not aim to reduce spending on NHS CHC, but to reduce the rate of growth of expenditure. The projection is for spending on NHS CHC to increase by over 20% by 2020/21, or an average of approximately 3.9% per year. NHS England understands that there is variation on how individual clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are commissioning these services, and SIP will be developing a range of commissioning tools to support CCGs in this role to deliver more efficient services.

Actions such as these and the Department’s recent review of the National Framework will ensure that we can deliver efficiency savings in our administration of CHC without restricting access to care.