Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the reasons are for the time taken to inform families involved in Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy procedures that funding for those procedures will cease.
Answered by Jane Ellison
NHS England has commissioned Selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR) procedures as part of its Commissioning through Evaluation (CtE) programme.
CtE schemes run in areas where the current evidence base on clinical and cost effectiveness of a particular treatment is insufficient to support routine funding, and where further research is unlikely to be forthcoming. In these circumstances, NHS England identifies funding for a CtE scheme to gather and support a review of the national clinical commissioning policy position. Each CtE scheme is funded on a time-limited basis, in just a small number of selected participating centres across England, with strict patient selection criteria.
The CtE programme is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which supports NHS England to identify the total number of patients that need to be treated under the scheme to answer the evaluation questions agreed. Schemes stop once the total planned number of patients has been treated and the data analysis can be concluded. In the case of the SDR scheme it is likely that the last patients will be treated by spring 2016.
The information provided directly by NHS England to stakeholders and participating centres in the SDR scheme has been consistently clear about the time limited nature of CtE and that the funding did not present a change to the current commissioning position of the treatment not being routinely funded by the NHS.
NHS England will continue to work closely with participating centres to ensure that messages are as clear as possible to families who may have wished to consider this treatment option.