Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what guidance his Department issues to clinical commissioning groups on implementation of quality statements made by NICE published in Quality Standards.

The Department has not issued any guidance to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) on implementation of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) quality standards.

NHS England has advised that NICE guidance, including quality standards, is built into advice provided to commissioners on specific clinical areas of work as appropriate. For example, the End of Life Commissioning Toolkit, published April 2016, supports delivery of the NICE Quality Standard on end of life care in adults and is published at:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/nhsiq-comms-eolc-tlkit-.pdf

In addition, as part of the current Diabetes Treatment and Care transformation funding bidding process, part of the scoring criteria for bids includes consideration of the degree to which the proposed developments will be compliant with NICE guidance, including relevant quality standards.

NICE has advised that it provides support and resources to help CCGs work with and use quality standards. This includes the development of formal indicators related to quality standards to measure the quality of care at CCG level, visits from the NICE field team of implementation consultants, a forward plan of topics, including likely resource implications, tools to support measurement against the standards and databases of shared learning examples about the experience of others working with quality standards and levels of uptake of these standards.