Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the findings of the recent Global Forum on Incontinence into improving health and social care in incontinence.

No assessment has been made of the findings of the recent Global Forum on Incontinence (GFI) into improving health and social care in incontinence. However, we applaud the work of the GFI and the work it is doing to improve the health and social care provisions for incontinence, giving patients and care givers a better quality of life.

Responsibility for continence services sit with NHS England and clinical commissioning groups (CCG). CCGs are responsible for commissioning high quality continence services based on an assessment of local need and performance managing their providers in the delivery of high quality services.

The Mandate to NHS England requires it to deliver continued improvements in relation to enhancing the quality of life for people with long-term conditions, including those suffering incontinence, across the five domains of the NHS Outcomes Framework. NHS England will be taking forward a major programme of work through the Primary Care Strategy; it has established a working group on continence care and will provide an update for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Continence Care on 24 June.

To improve standards in continence care, the Department commissioned the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to develop clinical guidelines on the management of urinary incontinence in women (issued in 2006) and faecal incontinence in adults (issued in 2007), which are supported by commissioning tools to support CCGs. In February, NICE published a clinical Quality Standard on Faecal Incontinence, QS54, which describes high-priority areas for quality improvement in this area. NHS England continues to champion the use of Quality Standards with both commissioners and providers.

We believe all patients have the right to be treated with dignity, respect and compassion.

We recognise that continence can impact on every aspect of peoples' lives and that it often requires a joined approach from both health and social care services. That is why in April the Department published the policy paper, Transforming Primary Care: safe proactive, personalised care for those who need it, which focuses on improving and individualising the management of out of hospital care, directly supporting those with continence problems by creating more integrated health and social care services. This paper has been placed in the Library.