Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to (a) improve the horizon scanning capabilities of the UK National Screening Committee and (b) increase alignment between National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommendations and newborn screening decisions.

Information about the UK National Screening Committee’s (UK NSC) methods, processes and criteria for reviewing conditions are all publicly available on its website.

The UK NSC Secretariat already has significant horizon scanning capabilities: it has connections and talks to key clinicians, users, and stakeholder groups; it liaises with colleagues at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence when a screening proposal is mooted; it holds and attends regular meetings with international colleagues; and it maintains an article alert service. It also receives many approaches from researchers active in the screening and mass testing areas.

The four United Kingdom Chief Medical Officers recently recommended expanding the UK NSC’s remit to increase its capabilities and scope, and the independent body has been working over the past year to implement these changes. Among the additional processes to ensure the UK NSC is appraised of what is on the horizon is the blood spot task group to help it identify practical and innovative approaches to the development and evaluation of evidence, and its new research and methodology group, which is made up of academics with multiple connections to research in screening and testing.

The UK NSC Secretariat is currently recruiting additional staff, including a new horizon scanning lead, which will further increase its ability to sift and assess evidence and make high quality recommendations even within the constraints of limited evidence bases, such as exists with rare diseases.