Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the guidance entitled FibroScan for assessing liver fibrosis and cirrhosis outside secondary and specialist care published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence on 7 June 2023, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of expanding the use of FibroScans in (a) primary and (b) community care.

A practice has clinical discretion to decide if a FibroScan is necessary and appropriate for a patient and can either provide directly or through a provider, typically a hospital out-patient appointment.

FibroScan capacity is also being increased via the community diagnostics centre (CDC) programme, backed as part of a £2.3 billion investment in diagnostic transformation. We currently have plans for 11 sites to be live with FibroScans by the end of 2023/24; seven are currently live with the test. By March 2025 we will have 15 CDCs offering FibroScans.

NHS England is reviewing existing liver diagnosis pathways as part of its wider diagnostic transformation work, to determine what the best approach should be to identify patients at an earlier stage of liver disease, through a liver pathway starting in primary care and involving pathology labs and CDCs. This will include a combination of blood tests and FibroScans.