Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 28 October 2025 (HL10911), what evidence the Clinical Panel considered in their 2021 review of the Clinical Commissioning Policy: Gastroelectrical stimulation for gastroparesis, published in 2016.

The Government is committed to improving the lives of those living with rare diseases, such as gastroparesis under the UK Rare Diseases Framework. We published the fifth annual England action plan in February 2026, where we report on the steps we have taken to advance the priorities of the framework.

NHS England’s Clinical Panel considered evidence submitted to review the existing commissioning policy on gastroelectrical stimulation for gastroparesis. This included three evidence papers: a prospectively collected database summary from national gastroparesis registries from the US; a paper comparing surgical treatment (pyloric surgery) with gastric electric stimulation; and an outcome paper from 2011, assessing the long-term clinical outcomes of gastric electrical stimulation therapy using a single manufacturers device.

The evidence considered was more recent than that included in the original 2016 evidence review. However, NHS England concluded that the additional evidence was limited and did not constitute a sufficiently robust clinical evidence base to support any revision to the current policy position, under which the procedure is not routinely commissioned. Clinicians may trigger a review of NHS England’s commissioning policies if new evidence is published.

NHS England does not hold data identifying the number of patients who have received gastric electrical stimulation in each of the past five years. There are a small number of patients who had an electrical stimulator inserted before the ‘not for routine commissioning’ policy was published, who will have presented to services for battery changes.