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Written Question
Pregnancy
Monday 11th September 2017

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that mothers are properly supported following childbirth with their (a) general and (b) mental health.

Answered by Philip Dunne

The Government is committed to ensuring that mothers are properly supported following childbirth with their general and mental health.

We are committed to improving maternity outcomes and experience of care for women and babies, as set out in Safer Maternity Care: next steps towards the national maternity ambition, published in October 2016. This should start before childbirth and the Government is supporting the Our Chance campaign to support women to understand advice about healthy pregnancies and how to act on it.

The National Institute for Care and Excellence has published quality standards on postnatal care, which includes the core care and support that every woman, their baby and if appropriate, their partner and family should receive during the postnatal period. This includes recognising women and babies with additional care needs and referring them to specialist services as required.

Evidence shows that the six-eight week appointment is a particularly crucial element of postnatal care. Better Births, the report of the National Maternity Review, states that the check should include assessing:

- how a woman has made the transition to motherhood, including her mental health;

- her recovery from the birth, using direct questions about common morbidities;

- longer term health risks for any morbidity identified; and

- any further help she might need whether connected with the birth or not; and what advice she might need about future family planning.

The Department has invested £365 million from 2015/16 to 2020/21 in perinatal mental health services, and NHS England is leading a transformation programme to ensure that by 2020/21 at least 30,000 more women each year are able to access evidence-based specialist mental health care during the perinatal period. This includes work to increase awareness and skills across the workforce, supporting better identification of perinatal mental illness, early intervention and consequently improved recovery rates.


Written Question
Maternity Services
Monday 11th September 2017

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans the Government has to act upon the recommendations made by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' report, Each Baby Counts, published in June 2017, to improve maternity care.

Answered by Philip Dunne

The Government and NHS England are supporting National Health Service maternity services to implement important changes that address the key recommendations in the Each Baby Counts report.

We published Safer Maternity Care: next steps towards the national maternity ambition in October last year to achieve the National Maternity Ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and brain injuries by 2030. This action plan, which feeds into the NHS England-led Maternity Transformation Programme, includes:

- an £8 million Maternity Safety Training Fund, which has been shared out to every NHS maternity unit to enable multidisciplinary teams to undertake training on CGT fetal monitoring, obstetric emergency skills and drills, leadership, human factors and team working;

- the Saving Babies Lives Care Bundle which supports maternity teams by bringing together four key elements of care based on best available evidence and practice in order to help reduce stillbirth rates – these are reducing smoking in pregnancy, risk assessment and surveillance for fetal growth restriction, raising awareness of reduced fetal movement and effective fetal monitoring during labour;

- the development of a National Standardised Perinatal Mortality Review Tool that will be available later this year to support maternity and neonatal units to undertake and share learning from standardised, high quality case reviews of every stillbirth and neonatal death; and

- consultation on a Rapid Resolution and Redress scheme, which would contribute to reducing severe avoidable birth injuries through improved investigations and learning.

In addition, NHS Improvement launched a new Maternal and Neonatal Health Safety Collaborative – a three-year programme to improve clinical practices and reduce variations in outcomes involving every trust, making it one of the largest maternity quality improvement programmes.


Written Question
Carers
Thursday 23rd February 2017

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the steps taken by organisations to support carers to increase agile working practices.

Answered by David Mowat

In 2016, the Department carried out an extensive call for evidence, including a roundtable event with employers, to inform the development of a new Carers Strategy. As part of this exercise, the Department reviewed many examples of employers which have implemented workplace policies to support employees with caring responsibilities, and the growing evidence base on the benefits to businesses and carers of flexible working arrangements.

Earlier this month, the Department for Work and Pensions published Fuller Working Lives: A Partnership Approach, which sets out a range of ongoing partnership work with employers to support working carers aged over 50 and to continue to grow the evidence base in this area.


Written Question
Carers
Tuesday 24th January 2017

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what discussions the Government has had with NHS England on ensuring that the mandate to NHS England for 2017-18 reflects the Government's plans to improve support for carers through its forthcoming Carers Strategy.

Answered by David Mowat

The Government’s mandate to NHS England for 2016-17 set a clear expectation that carers should routinely be identified by services and given access to information and advice about the support available.

The Government’s mandate to NHS England for 2017-18 is currently being developed in consultation with NHS England and Healthwatch England, and will be published in due course.

Discussions are ongoing between the Government and NHS England to develop a range of actions to further support carers through the forthcoming Carers Strategy.


Written Question
Contraceptives
Friday 21st October 2016

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment his Department has made of the implications of a reduction in the number of healthcare professionals trained to fit intra-uterine methods of contraception on women's access to contraception.

Answered by Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford

No such assessment has been made. Since 2013, local authorities have been mandated to commission open access contraceptive services, including intra-uterine methods that meet the needs of their local populations. Data published by NHS Digital on 19 October 2016 showed that the number of women fitted with intra-uterine methods in sexual and reproductive health services increased slightly from 2014/15 (121,900) to 2015/16 (123,500) and by 79% compared to 10 years ago.


Written Question
Pharmacy
Monday 17th October 2016

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many pharmacies are now clustered.

Answered by David Mowat

We know that 40% of pharmacies are in clusters of three or more meaning that two-fifths of pharmacies are within 10 minutes’ walk of two or more other pharmacies.

But we also know that in many places there are far more than this. For example, on Loughborough Road in Leicester there are 12 pharmacies, all within 10 minutes’ walk of each other. Similarly on Clodeshall Road in Birmingham, there are 11 pharmacies within 10 minutes’ walk. There are many more examples of clusters of pharmacies throughout England, with one cluster in London of 18 pharmacies within 10 minutes of each other. The median average pharmacy currently receives £220,000 per year in National Health Service funding. This includes a fixed payment of £25,000 per year for almost all pharmacies, regardless of their size or quality. This represents an inefficient allocation of NHS funds.


Written Question
Heart Diseases: Screening
Wednesday 7th September 2016

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the Italian model for screening heart conditions in young people who participate in organised sport.

Answered by David Mowat

Last year the United Kingdom National Screening Committee (UK NSC) reviewed published evidence and literature on the risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) relating to a variety of conditions including in young people who participated in organised sport and recommended that screening should not be offered.

Cardiac screening is mandatory in Italy where young people undertake sport. This has resulted in an 89% decrease in mortality of those tested based data published in 2005 from one region in Italy.

There are a number of questions relating to the effectiveness of the Italian programme that are not available in published literature. We are awaiting a response from the Italian Health Minister on behalf of the UK NSC requesting access to the data for the whole of Italy so that the UK NSC could see to what extent the data is representative of Italy as a country overall. The UK NSC will be reviewing the evidence for SCD again in 2018/19 and welcomes any data from the Italian government.


Written Question
Familial Hypercholesterolaemia: Diagnosis
Tuesday 24th May 2016

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether his Department plans to take steps to increase diagnosis rates of familial hypercholesterolemia.

Answered by Jane Ellison

NHS England and Public Health England (PHE) are working to raise the profile of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) and break down the barriers to genetic testing.

NHS England’s national clinical director (NCD) for heart disease chairs an FH steering group which comprises representatives from relevant stakeholder organisations. This group, with funding from the British Heart Foundation (BHF), has established FH specialist nurses in many areas of England, aimed at increasing FH cascade testing so that more affected families can be identified. The NCD has worked closely with BHF in their appointment of the FH Nurses, and with the other major charity in this field - HEART-UK. Software to support cascade testing and provide a database for FH is available and will be increasingly used in England as FH services are established.

NHS England has also identified FH as a possible condition that it could focus on as part of the work looking into personalised medicine and how the National Health Service might make better use of increased genetic testing.

Furthermore, the Healthcare Public Health Team at PHE is working in collaboration with national and local partners and experts in the field through an FH Steering Group chaired by the National Clinical Director for Cardiology, and led by the BHF, to develop a systems approach to the detection and management of FH.


Written Question
Heart Diseases: Young People
Tuesday 24th May 2016

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of the Italian model of cardiac screening for young people involved in sport.

Answered by Jane Ellison

There are a number of questions relating to the effectiveness of the Italian programme that are not available in published literature. The screening programme had been asked previously to provide unpublished data and information but have not to date done so. I wrote to the Italian government again in February 2016 with no response received. Departmental officials will continue to follow this up.

The most recent review of risk of sudden cardiac death reviewed published evidence and literature relating to a variety of programmes including that in Italy;

http://legacy.screening.nhs.uk/suddencardiacdeath


Written Question
Maternity Services: Digital Technology
Wednesday 13th April 2016

Asked by: Mims Davies (Conservative - Mid Sussex)

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what discussions his Department and NHS England have had with the National Information Board on developing a digital maternity tool as recommended in the National Maternity Review.

Answered by Ben Gummer

To date there have been no formal discussions with the National Information Board (NIB) in relation to developing a maternity digital tool. Baroness Cumberlege, Chair of the National Maternity Review, has been a member of the NIB since December 2015. We understand that Baroness Cumberlege has had informal discussions with the NIB Chair regarding the Maternity Review.

The digital technology workstream for the implementation of the maternity review will support the rollout of patient-held digital maternity records and the development of a digital tool to support expectant parents with access to improved information to support their pregnancy, choice and connection to peers.

This work will embed the ambitions outlined by the NIB in relation to supporting greater self-care through digital services and tools, paper-free at the point of care.