Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure equal experiences of patients with (a) Chron's disease and (b) Ulcerative Colitis in the South West.

The Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) national specialty report on gastroenterology was published in September 2021. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis is one of the conditions covered under gastroenterological services in the report. The report sets out actions and recommendations to improve patient care in gastroenterology. The aim is to reduce unwarranted variation in treatments and services in, which will ensure consistent care is provided to IBD patients across the country.

The GIRFT programme is now embedded within NHS England programmes to improve quality and productivity, so that best practice is adopted throughout the National Health Service. RightCare scenarios support local systems to identify where patient outcomes, quality of life and service costs can be improved as the result of shifting the care pathway from a suboptimal journey to an optimal one that consistently delivers timely, evidence-based excellence of care. Once published, a new IBD RightCare scenario will set out high-quality joined-up care at every point of the patient journey.