Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of preparedness for future pandemics.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne
The Department is embedding lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic within its approach to pandemic preparedness. This includes amending the approach to cover all five routes of communicable disease transmission, rather than focusing on planning for specific threats. We are working with partners in the health and social care system, including the UK Health Security Agency and NHS England, to maintain a flexible and scalable set of response capabilities that can be adapted to any future novel disease. The approach to pandemic preparedness also recognises that the underlying resilience of the health and social care system is crucial to the ability to respond to a novel disease threat.
The UK COVID-19 Inquiry published its first report on 18 July 2024, which focuses on resilience and preparedness for a pandemic, and the Department will consider the inquiry’s recommendations in full.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support adults affected by backlogs for ADHD assessments.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
It is the responsibility of integrated care boards (ICBs) to make available appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local population, including support for those waiting for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) assessments, in line with the relevant National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines.
We are supporting a cross-sector taskforce that NHS England has launched to explore challenges in ADHD service provision and to help provide a joined-up approach for the growing numbers of people coming forward for support.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what her planned timetable is for the implementation of the Women’s Health Strategy; and whether she plans to help tackle disparities in access to fertility services for LGBTQ+ couples.
Answered by Maria Caulfield
The Women’s Health Strategy is a 10-year strategy. On 17 January 2024, my Rt hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, set out our priorities for implementing the Women’s Health Strategy in 2024. This statement is available at the following link:
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-01-17/hcws192
Improving access to fertility treatment is a priority in the Women’s Health Strategy. On 15 May 2024, we laid a Statutory Instrument to update the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act to allow gamete donation for people with HIV, who have an undetectable viral load. It will also eliminate additional screening costs for female same sex couples undertaking reciprocal, or shared motherhood, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. This is part of wider work to improve access to IVF for everyone, and ensure same-sex couples have the same rights as a man and woman when accessing fertility treatment.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will bring forward legislative proposals to protect the titles for all (a) psychologists, (b) psychotherapists, (c) counsellors and (d) other psychological therapy providers.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
All professional healthcare regulators have protected titles, relating to the professions they regulate. There are currently 64 protected titles across 10 professional health and care regulators, including nine protected titles relating to the practitioner psychologist profession, regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council.
Titles can only be protected for statutorily regulated professions. There are no plans to statutorily regulate psychologist, psychotherapist, counsellor, or other psychological therapy provider roles.
The Government keeps the professions subject to statutory regulation under review and in 2022 published the consultation, Healthcare regulation: deciding when statutory regulation is appropriate, seeking views on the criteria used to decide when regulation is necessary, and whether there are any unregulated professions that should be brought into statutory regulation. The Government will publish its response to the consultation in due course.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of waiting times for gynaecological care and treatment in (a) the North East and (b) England as of 21 February 2023.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
The Delivery Plan for Tackling the COVID-19 Backlog of Elective Care outlines how the National Health Service will bring down waiting times across all elective services. The plan does not prioritise specialties, but the NHS continues to focus on reducing the longest waits, providing high levels of support and scrutiny, targeted at the trusts which have the highest number of patients waiting the longest for elective treatment.
To support this plan and tackle waiting lists, including those in gynaecology, the Government plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to drive up and protect elective activity. We are also increasing capacity, including for gynaecological surgery, through our surgical hubs, delivered by the Getting It Right First Time ‘High Volume Low Complexity’ programme.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
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 reduce waiting times for a hysterectomy in (a) County Durham and (b) England.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson
The Delivery Plan for Tackling the COVID-19 Backlog of Elective Care outlines how the National Health Service will bring down waiting times across all elective services. The plan does not prioritise specialties or certain interventions, but the NHS continues to focus on reducing the longest waiting times and providing high levels of support and scrutiny, targeted at the trusts which have the highest number of patients waiting the longest time, for elective treatment.
To support this plan and tackle waiting lists, including those in gynaecology, the Government plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to drive up and protect elective activity. We are also increasing capacity, including for gynaecological surgery, through our surgical hubs, delivered by the Getting It Right First Time’s High Volume Low Complexity programme.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
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 help tackle health inequalities in the North East.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
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 reduce waiting lists for autism assessments (a) nationally and (b) in County Durham.
Answered by Maria Caulfield
We expect integrated care boards (ICBs) to have due regard to relevant National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on autism when commissioning services. It is the responsibility of ICBs to make available appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local population, in line with these NICE guidelines.
Each ICB in England, including in the North East and North Cumbria, is expected to have an Executive Lead for learning disability and autism, supporting the board in planning to meet the needs of its local population of people with a learning disability and autistic people, including in relation to appropriate autism assessment pathways. NHS England has published guidance on these roles.
On 5 April 2023, NHS England published a national framework and operational guidance for autism assessment services. This guidance will help the National Health Service improve autism assessment pathways and improve the experience for people referred to an autism assessment service.
In addition, NHS England publish quarterly data on how many people are waiting for an autism assessment and for how long. These are experimental statistics; however, the data does provide useful information nationally and locally to support local areas to improve their performance and to reduce assessment waiting times.
We have invested in improving autism assessment services over recent years. Building on the 2021/22 investment of £13 million, we invested £2.5 million in 2022/23 to support local areas with improvements in autism assessment pathways. In 2023/2024, £4.2 million of funding is available across England to improve services for autistic children and young people, including autism assessment services.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of NHS preparedness in County Durham for winter 2023-24; and how much additional funding her Department plans to provide to NHS services in County Durham for winter 2023-24.
Answered by Helen Whately - Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
No specific assessment has been made centrally by the Department, as local winter resilience plans and resourcing are an operational matter for the National Health Service.
NHS winter planning started earlier this year than in previous years. The urgent and emergency care recovery plan was published in January which included £1 billion of dedicated funding to support capacity. In July 2023, NHS England wrote to integrated care boards, trusts and primary care networks to set out a national approach to 2023/24 winter planning and the key steps to be taken across all parts of the system to meet the challenges expected from winter pressures.
Asked by: Mary Kelly Foy (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average waiting time was for registering with an NHS dentist in City of Durham constituency in the latest period for which data is available.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom
Patients do not routinely join National Health Service dental waiting lists and are only registered with a dental practice for a course of treatment. We are working on our Dentistry Recovery Plan which will address how we continue to improve access, particularly for new patients; and how we make NHS work more attractive to ensure NHS dentists are incentivised to deliver more NHS care.