Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether patients with recognised palliative or end-of-life care needs are subject to specific identification or prioritisation processes within accident and emergency departments.

Patients attending an emergency department are assessed on arrival by an appropriately trained clinician or healthcare professional using established clinical triage processes. Triage is intended to identify patients who require the most urgent assessment and treatment, with priority determined by clinical need and the severity of the patient's condition rather than by any single diagnosis or patient group.

Where patients have recognised palliative or end-of-life care needs, clinicians will take account of the patient's presenting condition, any relevant advance care plans or documented care preferences, and exercise clinical judgement when determining the most appropriate course of treatment or onward care.

There is no national urgent and emergency care policy that provides a separate triage category or automatic prioritisation process solely on the basis that a patient is identified as having palliative care or end-of-life care needs.

The Single Patient Record will support our wider integration work providing a single trusted source of patient information, including care plans, that will be available to providers of health and care enabling them to offer more seamless co-ordinated care across the range of health and care services. Our ambition is that, from 2028, patients in England will be able to view their Single Patient Record via the NHS App, starting with maternity and frailty.

We are developing a Modern Service Framework (MSF) for Palliative Care and End-of-life care. The MSF will provide a clinically led, evidence-based framework to support sustained improvement in patient and carer outcomes, including reducing both inequality and unwarranted variation. The MSF will provide the framework against which palliative care and end-of-life care will be improved across all settings, including hospital and community.

The MSF will build on the ambitions set out in the Neighbourhood Health Framework to improve the identification of people approaching the end of life by 10% and reduce non elective admissions and hospital bed days for people at the end of life by 10% by March 2029. We recognise that care can be planned more proactively, and unwanted emergency admissions avoided, through good palliative care in the community.