Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to reduce waiting times for dietetic services in the NHS.

Clinical commissioning groups are responsible for assuring timely access to dietetic services, both in hospitals and community settings.

In addition, the NHS Long Term Plan makes several direct commitments to support timely intervention for specific conditions such as weight management services in primary care for people with a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes or hypertension with a Body Mass Index of 30+ (adjusted appropriately for ethnicity), where it is known that significant impact can be made on improving health, reducing health inequalities and reducing costs.

The Long Term Plan commits to test a National Health Service programme supporting very low-calorie diets for obese people with type 2 diabetes. Additionally, the Long Term Plan commits to fund a doubling of the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme over the next five years, including a new digital option to widen patient choice and target inequality.

Nutrition training, and an understanding of what is involved in achieving and maintaining a healthy weight, varies between medical schools. The Long Term Plan commits to working with academic institutes to increase focus across the professional bodies and universities to ensure nutrition has a greater place in professional education and training.

Additionally, NHS England’s nutrition quality improvement collaborative programme, 41 NHS provider organisations have focussed on gaining improvements in the accuracy of nutritional screening and subsequent appropriateness of nutritional care. These organisations have introduced a range of interventions to directly improve care locally.