Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to (a) improve diagnosis and care pathways for patients with peripheral arterial disease and (b) improve funding routes for the adoption of innovative technologies that will facilitate faster and safer diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

The Department is working with NHS England to take several steps to improve diagnosis, care and treatment for patients with peripheral arterial disease. For example, in 2022, NHS England commissioned a two-year Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) scheme, which incentivised the adoption of the Vascular Peripheral Arterial Disease Quality Improvement Framework, to support timely interventions for revascularisation. This measures the proportion of patients that have a diagnosis of chronic limb threatening ischaemia (CLTI) that undergo revascularisation within five days of a non-elective admission to vascular providers.

As part of NHS England’s assessment on the adequacy of current diagnosis and treatment pathways, it commissions the National Vascular Registry (NVR) to provide information on the quality and outcomes of care for adults who have major vascular procedures. The NVR provides annual and quarterly reports for emergency and elective vascular procedures, including for those people with peripheral arterial disease who undergo either lower limb angioplasty/stent, lower limb bypass surgery, or major lower limb amputation.

Following the introduction of these measures we can see that from over a two-year period from the first quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2024, NVR data demonstrated that vascular providers achieving the CQUIN had increased from 47% to 55%. During this period, the number of providers submitting data to the NVR had also increased by approximately 14% and every National Health Service region showed an improvement in CLTI revascularisation quality.

Furthermore, NHS England has commissioned the NVR to facilitate an ‘outliers’ process in which vascular providers are monitored on several key performance metrics including CLTI revascularisation. NHS England continues to monitor all specialised vascular disease services via the NVR and working in collaboration with NHS England regional teams and integrated care boards.