Asked by: Stephen Phillips (Conservative - Sleaford and North Hykeham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, on how many occasions his Department has been notified by external consultants or other third parties of breaches by employees or subcontractors of those consultants of document retention or security policies relating to confidential or secure materials in each of the last two years.
Answered by Jane Ellison
The Department’s Security and Business Continuity team does not collect this information centrally and therefore does not hold this information.
The Department includes terms and conditions in its contracts that require suppliers to inform us of any such breaches that may have taken place. Any occurrences would have to be reported directly to all local contract owners and to identify these would require trawling across all the Department’s branches that would incur a disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Stephen Phillips (Conservative - Sleaford and North Hykeham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that hospitals balance their budgets.
Answered by George Freeman
We are investing the additional £8 billion the National Health Service has said it needs to implement its own future plan, on top of the extra £2 billion we have given the service. However, additional spending is not the only answer to these financial challenges. The NHS must now put in place cost-control measures we have introduced, like clamping down on rip-off staffing agencies, while we continue to work with hospitals on ways to improve productivity and reduce waste.
Asked by: Stephen Phillips (Conservative - Sleaford and North Hykeham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to work with international counterparts to ensure the sharing of best practice to increase organ donation.
Answered by Jane Ellison
NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) - the United Kingdom organ donation organisation responsible for matching and allocating donated organs - actively participates and is involved in European Union initiatives to increase organ donation. This includes two current major European organ donation projects: the ACCORD (Achieving Comprehensive Coordination in Organ Donation) and FOEDUS (Facilitating the Exchange of Organs Donated in EU Member States) projects. NHSBT was also a collaborating partner for the completed ODEQUS (European Organ Donation Quality System) project.
The UK drew heavily on evidence of world-wide success, such as Spain, for the development and implementation of the Organ Donation Taskforce recommendations published in 2008, which saw donor rates rise by 50% in five years. A number of international experts from the Unites States of America, Germany and The Netherlands also contributed to the development of the UK's new strategy published in 2013 Taking Organ Transplantation to 2020. A number of measures will be used to track improvements in performance in organ donation and transplantation to compare with international benchmarks, in order to try and match the best performing programmes in the world.