Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department are taking to improve the quality of homecare medicines services.

National Homecare Medicines Committee (NHMC) regional lead members and NHS England Commercial Medicines Unit use and reference the Royal Pharmaceutical Society Standards for homecare medicines service, which are embedded into all framework agreement service specifications for the providers of this service. These professional standards provide a broad framework which support teams involved in homecare services to deliver a safe, effective and quality-driven service for patients. These standards can be found at the following link:

https://www.rpharms.com/Portals/0/RPS%20document%20library/Open%20access/Professional%20standards/Professional%20standards%20for%20Homecare%20services/homecare-standards-final-sept-13.pdf

In 2014, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society published the Handbook for Homecare Services in England to aid implementation of these standards. This identified examples of good practice which may be used by homecare teams to develop robust arrangements for compliance with those standards. The NHMC holds regular meetings with all homecare providers focused on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for standards based on those contained in Appendix 10 National KPI definitions of the Handbook for Homecare Services in England.

Homecare providers are assessed on a monthly basis against their KPIs at a national level for NHS England framework agreements and at a regional level for National Health Service regional contracting, and more formally on a regular basis through face-to-face meetings with NHMC and NHS England. The quality assurance and governance process covers the monitoring of patients’ adverse events, complaints and incidents.

When the KPIs from individual contracts or reports from NHS hospitals indicate that service levels are not to the high standard expected, the NHMC Supplier Engagement sub-group has an escalation process.

Each Chief Pharmacist within each NHS organisation is the responsible officer for the homecare medicines services that the hospital provides. Where the escalation process is in place, the affected homecare provider will engage with this process and provide communication to each NHS organisation with a summary of the issues, mitigations and expected timescales for recovery. If necessary, the regulators, the Care Quality Commission and the General Pharmaceutical Council, are also informed.