Amputees: Limb Fitting

Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have, if any, to introduce a national system of recording (1) the number of, (2) the treatment received by, and (3) the dates of treatments for, new amputees attending limb fitting centres in England.

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend for his continuing interest in wanting to improve services in this important area. As an ex-surgeon he has significant expertise and insight. From 1 April this year, NHS England’s specialised commissioning has required all limb centres delivering amputee services to complete a data reporting template which will collect the information described. The data is not expected to be published as a national statistic but is collected to support the commissioning process.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her usual helpful reply. She has done so well in stimulating the Department of Health, because in November last year the department told us that it did not collect this information centrally—so I am very glad that she has had success. Will the information be collated?

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, the data collection is not expected to be published routinely but is submitted by the provider to the relevant commissioning hub as a contractual requirement under schedule 6 of the NHS contract information reporting requirements. But I hope that my noble friend will be pleased to hear that we will be considering making available a summary of this data in due course once we have established that it has been collected and reported appropriately.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Manzoor]

I agree that it is important that we reduce the variations and that NICE guidelines are followed. NHS England’s service specifications include a duty to reduce inequalities. They set out a number of issues to ensure that there is improved access, including flexible appointments, rehabilitation and reablement—but the noble Lord is quite right that we must address the variations.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

Does the Minister agree that the way to reduce the number of amputations is to reduce the causes of them, one of which is the obesity epidemic? If a person’s waist measurement is more than half their height, it means that they are eating too much of the gross national product.

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, absolutely. As someone who has had a problem with her weight all her life, I do agree. Losing weight is not as easy to do it as it is to say, but obesity plays a key role in diabetes and we need to get it under control.