Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the effect of delays in discharges from NHS Spinal Cord Injury Centres on patients awaiting treatment; and what steps his Department has taken to reduce those delays.

NHS England is aware of the benefits of timely admission to a Spinal Cord Injury Centre (SCIC). A key aim of the Spinal Cord Injury Review is to produce a service that is able to offer each newly injured patient prompt admission to a SCIC.

We are currently working with the existing eight centres to develop a network model that will allow the sharing of best practice and improve standardisation of high quality care. This would include learning from the experiences of centres that currently have the lowest waiting times for admission. The network would also enable the co-ordination of the actions of referring hospitals and their awareness of the referral processes to SCI centres and ensure they are supported with information and specialist advice about how best to look after cord injured patients prior to admission.

There is also work underway looking at options to increase SCI care provision to meet unmet demand across the eight centres, with the possibility of a new unit to serve the population that currently has limited access to a SCI centre. Any new SCI unit would need to be co-located with a major trauma centre.