Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to help ensure patients diagnosed with Parkinson's disease receive an appointment with a specialist within six weeks.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) guidance, Parkinson’s disease: Diagnosis and management in primary and secondary care, updated in 2017, sets out best practice for clinicians in the identification and treatment of Parkinson’s disease in line with the latest available evidence. The guidance states that if Parkinson’s disease is suspected, people should be referred quickly and without treatment to a specialist with expertise in the differential diagnosis of this condition.

We expect integrated care boards (ICBs) and National Health Service trusts to have due regard to relevant NICE guidelines. It is the responsibility of ICBs to make available the appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local population, in line with these NICE guidelines.

More generally, cutting waiting lists is one of the Prime Minister’s top priorities. We are making good progress on tackling the longest waits, to ensure patients get the care they need when they need it. Ambitions to eliminate long waits were set out in the elective recovery plan, with the overall aim of eliminating waits of over a year for elective care, by March 2025.

To facilitate this across elective services, we are increasing activity, with plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25. This includes expanding capacity through the creation of a new network of community diagnostic centres, and maximising all available independent sector capacity.