Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many fire fighters have developed cancer in the first 10 years after retirement since 1967.
Answered by Steve Brine
The Government does not collect or hold any data on firefighters developing cancer after retirement.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the effects of high-cost and low-volume sugary drinks on levels of obesity.
Answered by Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford
No assessment has been made specifically of the link between high-cost, low-volume sugary drinks and levels of obesity. However, in July 2015 the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) published its report on Carbohydrates and Health which considers the relationship between the intake of sugars-sweetened drinks and weight gain.
Evidence from randomised controlled trials conducted in children and adolescents indicate that consumption of sugars-sweetened drinks, compared with non-calorically sweetened drinks, results in greater weight gain and increases in body mass index. This finding suggests that there is inadequate reduction in energy from other foods or drinks to compensate for energy delivered as sugars.
SACN recommended that consumption of sugars-sweetened beverages should be minimised in children and adults.
The SACN report on Carbohydrates and Health is available to view here:
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how his Department plans to fund the proposed cap on residential care costs.
Answered by David Mowat
The Government remains committed to introducing a cap on care costs and extension of means tested support from April 2020.
The Spending Review 2015 set budgets for the next four years to 2019-20. The final year includes funding to cover the costs of local authorities preparing to implement the changes the following year. Decisions about the allocation of funding for these reforms will be confirmed nearer the time.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what proportion of community hospitals are in (a) Devon and (b) East Devon.
Answered by David Mowat
The Department does not hold the total number of community hospitals centrally.
However, there are currently 28 community hospitals across Devon, with four community hospitals in the East Devon constituency.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to decrease the number of people missing or cancelling ophthalmology appointments.
Answered by David Mowat
Local National Health Service organisations are responsible for making their own arrangements for minimising the number of people missing or cancelling ophthalmology appointments.
The Department, in conjunction with behavioural scientists at Imperial College, conducted randomised controlled trials at Barts Hospitals NHS Trust looking at the content of the most effective text message reminder. The results were published in an online academic journal in September 20151 and summarised on the Department’s website in January 20162.
1 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137306
2 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reducing-missed-hospital-appointments-using-text-messages
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much missed or cancelled ophthalmology appointments in the Northern, Eastern and Western Devon Clinical Commissioning Group area cost the NHS in 2015-16.
Answered by David Mowat
This information is not available centrally.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether he has considered introducing refundable charges for GP visits.
Answered by David Mowat
One of the key principles of National Health Service care is that it should be free at the point of delivery. Introducing charges is not being considered, as it would undermine this central principle.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to improve GP appointment waiting times.
Answered by David Mowat
According to the latest GP Patient Survey (published in July 2016), 84.7% of respondents indicated that they were able to get an appointment the last time they tried. Of those who were able to get an appointment, 92.1% say their appointment was convenient and 81.9% of patients who wanted to see a doctor or nurse on the same day were able to do so.
The Government is committed to improving access to general practitioner (GP) services as part of our plan for a seven day National Health Service. To implement this, £175 million has been invested in the GP Access Fund to test improved and innovative access to GP services. Across the two waves of the Access Fund, there are 57 schemes covering over 2,500 practices and 18 million patients – a third of the population – that have benefited from improved access and transformational change at local level.
This includes more appointments being made available, especially at times more convenient for patients, such as weekday evenings and weekends. It also includes different approaches like telephone consultations and better use of the wider primary care workforce (such as Advanced Nurse Practitioners, pharmacists, the voluntary sector, physiotherapists and paramedics) to deliver improved access to patients.
These approaches have helped release local GP capacity, improve patient choice, and more appropriately matched the needs of patients with the most appropriate professional to care for them. In addition to Access Fund sites, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) may offer local initiatives for improving access to GPs.
Practices in the GP Access Fund are testing an automated appointment measuring interface (the GP Appointment Tool) to give them detailed information about their activity and how it varies over time. This will help practices match their supply of appointments more closely to demand. It will be available for every practice from 2017-18.
The General Practice Forward View, published in April 2016, announced that an extra £2.4 billion a year will be invested in GP services by 2020-21. As part of overall investment in general practice, NHS England will provide over £500 million of recurrent funding by 2020-21, on top of current primary medical care allocations, to enable CCGs to commission and fund extra capacity across England. This is to ensure that by 2020, everyone has access to GP services, including sufficient routine appointments at evenings and weekends to meet locally determined demand, alongside effective access to out-of-hours and urgent care services.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will estimate the cost to the NHS of missed GP appointments in each of the last five years.
Answered by David Mowat
Information on the number and cost of missed general practice appointments in England is not held centrally.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to increase the number of (a) doctors and (b) nurses recruited by the NHS.
Answered by Philip Dunne
The responsibility for recruitment and staffing rests with National Health Service organisations as they are best placed to ensure they have the right staff, in the right place, at the right time to provide safe and effective care for their patients.
On 4 October 2016 the Secretary of State for Health announced that from September 2018, the Government will fund up to 1,500 additional undergraduate medical places through university medical schools each year.
In November 2015 reforms to nursing, midwifery and allied health pre-registration training was announced, the reforms aim to increase the number of training places by up to 10,000 by the end of the Parliament.
As outlined in its Workforce Plan for 2016-17, Health Education England has increased the overall volume of education and training with, in excess of, 38,000 new training places in 2016-17 for nurses, scientists, and therapists, and there are now over 50,000 doctors and dentists currently in training.
The latest workforce statistics published by NHS Digital for June 2016 show that since May 2010, there are now almost 22,700 more professionally qualified clinical staff working in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups, including over 8,500 more doctors and 4,600 more nurses and midwives.