Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will request that NICE publishes its reasons for including a recommendation on the use of C-reactive protein testing for patients presenting with lower respiratory tract infection in primary care in its guidance on pneumonia but not in its pneumonia draft quality statement.

The prioritisation of topics for inclusion in quality standards is a matter for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). NICE has advised that its Quality Standards Advisory Committee considered the inclusion of a quality statement on the use of C-reactive protein testing for patients presenting with lower respiratory tract infection in primary care in its draft quality standard on pneumonia, but felt that this was not an area to be prioritised.

The minutes of Quality Standards Advisory Committee meetings are published on NICE’s website at:

www.nice.org.uk/get-involved/meetings-in-public/quality-standards-advisory-committee