Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of intermittent self-catheterisation with single use catheters on the level of hospital admissions in England for urinary tract infections; and what steps they are taking to ensure that patients with urinary continence challenges have access to single use catheters.

No such assessment has been made. However, the National Institute of Health Research is funding a study to determine whether using a mixture of re-usable and single-use catheters is as safe and acceptable for intermittent catheterisation as using only single-use catheters.

We are not currently taking any specific steps to ensure patients have access to single use catheters. The decision of which device should be offered to patients remains a clinical one.