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 ensure the programme of work on accessible information is (a) adequately resourced and (b) prioritised in NHS England.

National Health Service organisations and publicly funded social care providers must comply with the Accessible Information Standard (AIS) to meet the communication needs of patients and carers with a disability, impairment or sensory loss. NHS England has completed a review of the AIS to help ensure that everyone’s communication needs are met in health and care provision. The review considered the effectiveness of the current AIS, how the standard is implemented and enforced in practice, and identified recommendations for improvement.

Following publication of the revised standard, NHS England will continue work to support its implementation with awareness raising, communication and engagement and updated e-learning modules on the AIS to ensure NHS staff are better aware of the standard and their roles and responsibilities in implementing it. The e-learning modules are accessible to everyone working in the NHS and adult social care services.

NHS England are responsible for the review of the AIS and publication and have sufficient resource for this. The implementation of the AIS will mostly take place at a local level and it will be for local systems to determine what resource is necessary.

A key part of the AIS review is the strengthening of assurance of compliance with implementation of the AIS. As such, an AIS self-assessment framework has been developed to support providers of NHS and social care services to measure their performance against the AIS and develop improvement action plans to address gaps in implementation. The self-assessment framework has also been designed to help the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to firstly gain insight into people's experiences and whether their accessible communication needs are being met and secondly help CQC better understand organisational performance and to include that in the CQC assessment framework for provider organisations.

For social care providers, a new duty on CQC to assess local authorities’ delivery of their Care Act 2014 duties went live on 1 April 2023, and as part of these assessments, under the theme of ‘Working With People’, CQC will consider to what extent local authorities ensure people in the area have access to the advocacy, information and advice they need to make informed decisions about how to meet their care and/or support needs.