Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
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 (a) blind, (b) partially sighted, (c) deaf and (d) hearing impaired patients receive (i) care and (ii) communications related to their heath in an accessible format; and if she will make an estimate of the cost to the public purse of missed appointments due to (A) inaccessible and (B) missed communications.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
Under the Equality Act (2010), health and social care organisations must make reasonable adjustments to ensure that disabled people, including blind, partially sighted, deaf, and hearing impaired patients, are not disadvantaged. Since 2016, all National Health Service organisations and publicly funded social care providers in England are required to comply with the Accessible Information Standard (AIS).
NHS England is responsible for the AIS, and have completed a review of the AIS to help ensure that the communication needs of people with a disability, impairment, or sensory loss are met in health and care provision. The AIS review included input from individuals with lived experience and voluntary sector organisations for blind, partially sighted, deaf, and hearing impaired patients.
One of the aims of the review was to strengthen assurance of implementation of the AIS, and a self-assessment framework has been developed to support providers of NHS and social care services, to measure their performance against the AIS and develop improvement action plans to address gaps in implementation. The AIS self-assessment framework is designed to enable enhancements around assurance and allows organisations, commissioners, and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to judge performance and compliance.
NHS England will publish a revised AIS in due course. Following publication, NHS England will continue work to support its implementation with awareness raising, communication and engagement, and updated e-learning modules on the AIS to ensure NHS staff are better aware of the standard, and their roles and responsibilities in implementing it.
NHS England collects data on the total costs of missed appointments, but that data is not broken down sufficiently to enable us to make an estimate of appointments missed due to inaccessible or missed communications.
Asked by: Sarah Edwards (Labour - Tamworth)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to return NHS Trusts to pre-pandemic procurement practices.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Guidance on how contracting authorities, including National Health Service trusts, should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic was published in March 2020 and February 2021, reminding them of the options available when undertaking procurements in an emergency. These two guidance documents are available, respectively, at the following links:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/procurement-policy-note-0120-responding-to-covid-19
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/procurement-policy-note-0121-procurement-in-an-emergency
Authorities are allowed to procure goods, services, and works with extreme urgency in exceptional circumstances, using regulation 32(2)(c) under the Public Contract Regulations 2015. These include a direct award under which authorities may enter into contracts without competing or advertising the requirement.
Contracting authorities assess the market conditions for procuring supplies related to any procurement, in accordance with procurement guidance and regulations. Where any procurement meets the tests for the use of Regulation 32(2)(c) for the direct awarding of a contract, then that approach can be used. However, where it doesn’t, other approaches will be considered.
Asked by: Fabian Hamilton (Labour - Leeds North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to increase access to NHS assessments for Autism Spectrum Conditions for children.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
I refer the hon. Member to the answer I gave to the hon. Member for St Ives on 22 March 2024, to Question 18917.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding her Department has provided to the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust in each year since 2015.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department allocates resource funding to NHS England who then use that to fund a series of local budgets, managed by integrated care boards (ICBs) and national budgets, managed by NHS England themselves.
ICBs then use those agreed budgets to fund the purchase of healthcare services for their local population, mostly from NHS providers.
The Department does not hold a breakdown of the sources of income received by individual trusts, but for the years requested the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust reported the following total income for its services in their year-end accounts:
Financial Year | Operating income from patient care activities (£000) | Other operating income (£000) |
2022/23 | £708,886 | £48,792 |
2021/22 | £638,695 | £41,499 |
2020/21 | £531,696 | £112,182 |
2019/20 | £475,065 | £64,183 |
2018/19 | £413,754 | £33,738 |
2017/18 | £394,512 | £38,649 |
2016/17 | £392,427 | £44,897 |
2015/16 | £386,840 | £36,588 |
2014/15 | £395,007 | £38,243 |
Source: The United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust published annual report and accounts, 2014/15 to 2022/23.
Asked by: Drew Hendry (Scottish National Party - Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions she has had with Royal Colleges on improving training to support (a) standards and (b) help with the impacts of caring for children in the context of Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
On 26 July 2023, the Department and NHS England participated in a round table with a range of stakeholders with an interest in Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC), including the Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Nursing, and Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, focusing on increasing awareness and impactful training to healthcare professionals and improving support to those affected by SUDC.
Healthcare regulators, such as the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council, are responsible for setting standards for undergraduate education, and medical Royal Colleges set the curriculum for postgraduate medical training.
NHS England provides a range of e-learning resources to help health professionals to support bereaved parents and families.
Asked by: Drew Hendry (Scottish National Party - Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions she has had with Royal Colleges on the (a) standards and (b) impacts of care on Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
On 26 July 2023, the Department and NHS England participated in a round table with a range of stakeholders with an interest in Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC), including the Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Nursing, and Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, focusing on increasing awareness and impactful training to healthcare professionals and improving support to those affected by SUDC.
Healthcare regulators, such as the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council, are responsible for setting standards for undergraduate education, and medical Royal Colleges set the curriculum for postgraduate medical training.
NHS England provides a range of e-learning resources to help health professionals to support bereaved parents and families.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to support NHS England to facilitate negotiating a better price for the drug trastuzumab deruxtecan.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England is responsible for negotiating commercial agreements with individual companies, and the Department encourages companies to come forward with proposals that represent value to the taxpayer. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published final draft guidance for appeal on the use of trastuzumab deruxtecan for the treatment of HER2-low metastatic or unresectable breast cancer after chemotherapy, and was unable to recommend it as a clinically and cost effective use of National Health Service resources at the price offered by the company. Following extensive discussions through late 2023 and into 2024, NHS England is no longer engaged in any active commercial negotiations on this topic, but remains available to work with the NICE, should AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo be willing to offer trastuzumab deruxtecan at a price that represents value to the NHS.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the new minimum rate for units of dental activity on NHS dentists.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Dentistry Recovery Plan will make dental services faster, simpler and fairer for patients and will fund around 2.5 million additional appointments, or more than 1.5 million additional courses of dental treatment. We will further support dentists by raising the minimum Units of Dental Activity (UDA) rate to £28 this year, making National Health Service work more attractive and sustainable. This has meant that almost 1,000 contracts will see an uplift to their UDA rate this year, supporting them and making treatment of NHS patients more sustainable.
We have also developed guidance to support local commissioning by ICBs, including how they can consider addressing UDA rates locally to support better delivery of dental care for patients. I will report to the House on impact shortly.
Asked by: Gen Kitchen (Labour - Wellingborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what proportion of dental practises are rated as Good by the CQC in Wellingborough constituency.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) team regulates all health and social care services in England. The Commission ensures the quality and safety of care in hospitals, dentists, ambulances, and care homes. The CQC does not rate dental practices, as they have been found to pose a lower risk to patient safety than other regulated sectors.
Asked by: Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party - Strangford)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to improve early intervention for mental health conditions in working-age adults.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
The £795 million of additional funding announced in the Autumn Statement will see thousands of working-age adults with mental ill health helped back into work over the next five years, keeping them out of poverty, improving their wellbeing, and raising their living standards.
This will increase the number of sessions per course of Talking Therapies treatment, to tackle the root causes of common mental health conditions like anxiety and depression and to broaden access, leading to an expected additional 384,000 people completing a course of treatment by 2028/29.
The investment will also fund an additional 100,000 Individual Placement and Support places over five years, which will help people with severe mental illness gain and retain paid employment.
Between 2019 and 2022, total number of NHS Talking Therapies staff across England, including clinical and non-clinical, has risen by 38%. NHS England has published a positive practice guide for NHS Talking Therapies staff working with those from black and ethnic minority groups, which is helping providers take appropriate action to ensure that communities have equality of access to NHS Talking Therapies