Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to reduce the waiting time for ADHD assessments.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
It is the responsibility of integrated care boards to make appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local population, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) assessments, in line with relevant National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines.
We are supporting a taskforce that NHS England is establishing to look at ADHD service provision and its impact on patient experience. The taskforce will bring together expertise from across a broad range of sectors, including the National Health Service, education, and justice, to better understand the challenges affecting people with ADHD, and to help provide a joined-up approach in response to concerns around rising demand.
Alongside the work of the taskforce, NHS England will continue to develop a national ADHD data improvement plan, carry out more detailed work to understand the provider and commissioning landscape, and capture examples from local health systems which are trialling innovative ways of delivering ADHD services to ensure best practice is captured and shared across the system.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
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 is for an ADHD Assessment in (a) Slough constituency and (b) the South East.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department of Health and Social Care has indicated that it will not be possible to answer this question within the usual time period. An answer is being prepared and will be provided as soon as it is available.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps they are taking to use (a) artificial intelligence and (b) data to help increase their Department's productivity.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department is committed to improving its productivity, including through artificial intelligence (AI), and effective use of data. To make AI and data work, the Department has focused on establishing the enablers for adopting AI responsibly, ethically, and at low cost, to ensure a high return on investment via productivity gains while also maintaining or improving process outcomes. Specifically, implementing governance and delivery structures that pool internal experts from across the Department and bring the consideration of ethics, information governance, cyber security, data science, analysis, and technology in line with guidance offered by the Central Digital and Data Office.
The Department has developed proof-of-concept projects to test these structures, including a Parliamentary Intelligence tool that saves 40 hours per week of staff time and improves the quality of insights, and a partially automated approach to consultation analysis that reduces the cost and time to analyse large consultations, while respecting The Gunning Principles.
The Department draws on a range of resources, published on GOV.UK, to inform our AI and data usage. For example, the Generative AI Framework, the Data Maturity Assessment, the Ethics, Transparency and Accountability Framework, the Data Ethics Framework, and the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard. The Department of Health and Social Care also has access to the Central Digital and Data Office, based in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, for expert advice.
Underpinning the Department’s approach to AI is shaping a data driven culture in the Department to support and enhance data science and data analysis capabilities, providing high quality data and data products in a secure, safe, legal, and ethical way. The Department has a large and mature analytical function who put data and insights at the heart of decision making and policy development. For example, the Data Hub that collates nearly 500 metrics in 27 dashboards across 13 topic areas, providing data and insights on-demand to inform decisions. The Department does not currently have any plans to implement automated decision-making systems, and people remain in full control of decision making, with AI augmenting their work.
The Department will continue to regularly review usage of AI and data to maximise productivity benefits for staff and the public.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
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 improve maternity services in (a) Slough constituency and (b) Berkshire.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department is supporting the National Health Service to deliver the three-year delivery plan for maternity and neonatal services across England, to make care safer, personalised, and more equitable for women and babies. Improvement in the Slough and East Berkshire maternity services includes aligning with the three-year delivery plan, and involves:
The Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has focused on addressing inequalities by improving access to perinatal mental health services, interpreter availability, and antenatal and preconception information, with an increase in folic acid uptake in Slough.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce instances of post traumatic stress disorder within the ambulance service.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
At a national level, NHS England has a wide-ranging package of support for National Health Service staff. This includes a health and wellbeing guardian role to ensure board level scrutiny of local support systems, a focus on healthy working environments, tools, resources to support line managers to hold meaningful conversations with staff to discuss their wellbeing, and emotional and psychological health and wellbeing support.
NHS England has worked with The Ambulance Staff Charity to fund the development of the Ambulance Staff Crisis phoneline which provides immediate, independent, and confidential support to ambulance staff experiencing suicidal ideation or a mental health crisis. Further information on The Ambulance Staff Charity is available at the following link:
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce the impact on the NHS from individuals who repeatedly misuse emergency ambulance services.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Inappropriate calls to 999 for an ambulance can impact on the availability and timeliness of services in a real emergency. All ambulance trusts have policies to deal with inappropriate or vexatious calls, and to manage frequent callers.
NHS England delivers a number of nationwide National Health Service campaigns to support the public to access NHS services at the right time and in the right way.
Campaign resources are also made available for local NHS organisations and teams to use, and they are encouraged to use these to run their own local campaign activity.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to increase public awareness of pancreatic cancer symptoms.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England is already taking steps to deliver a range of interventions to improve awareness of pancreatic cancer symptoms. NHS England runs Help Us Help You campaigns to increase knowledge of cancer symptoms and address barriers to acting on them, to encourage people to come forward as soon as possible to see their general practitioner. The campaigns focus on a range of symptoms, including symptoms of pancreatic cancer, as well as encouraging body awareness, to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an early point.
NHS England is also working with Pancreatic Cancer UK to develop a public-facing Family History Checker, which enables people, and their families, affected by pancreatic cancer to self-assess if they have inherited risk. People identified of being at risk are referred directly to the European Registry of Hereditary Pancreatic Diseases research trail, which aims to understand inherited conditions of the pancreas. Referrals to the trail can be made by any healthcare professional across all health sectors, or by individuals via self-referral.
NHS England and other National Health Service organisations, nationally and locally, also publish information on the signs and symptoms of many different types of cancer, including pancreatic cancer. This information can be found on the NHS website.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the progress of research on treatments for (a) Alzheimer's and (b) dementia.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department funds research into dementia via the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The Government is investing into research on treatments for dementia, such as the £49.9 million NIHR Dementia Trials Network (D-TN), which will deliver a coordinated network of early phase dementia trial sites, including for Alzheimer’s disease. The work undertaken by the NIHR D-TN will be complemented by the £20 million Dementia Clinical Trials Accelerator, designed to position the United Kingdom as the destination of choice for late phase clinical trials in dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.
The Government is also funding the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI), which conducts world-leading discovery science across neurodegenerative diseases and translates knowledge into tools and therapies that make a real, tangible difference. The NIHR is investing £20 million into the UK DRI over four years to enable discoveries to be taken out of the laboratory and into the lives of people that need them.
The NIHR welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health including dementia. These applications are subject to peer review and judged in open competition, with awards being made on the basis of the importance of the topic to patients, and health and care services, and its value for money, and scientific quality. In all disease areas, the amount of NIHR funding depends on the volume and quality of scientific activity.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of trends in the level of maternal health inequalities affecting black women.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
It is unacceptable that there are such stark inequalities in maternal outcomes. The Government is committed to closing the black and Asian maternal mortality gap. We are urgently considering the immediate action needed to tackle inequalities for women and babies in maternity care.
A key objective in NHS England’s three-year delivery plan for maternity and neonatal services, which we are currently supporting them to deliver, is to reduce inequalities for all in maternity access, experience, and outcomes, seeking to improve equity for mothers and babies. Ongoing assessment of the impact of our policies and programmes is vital to ensuring that we improve outcomes and tackle inequalities.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to meet the target for 85% of cancer patients to be treated within 62 days of referral.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We will get the National Health Service diagnosing cancer on time or earlier, treating it faster, and we will improve patients’ experience across the system.
Improving 62-day performance and early diagnosis are already key priorities for NHS England. Lord Darzi’s report will inform our 10-Year Health Plan to reform the NHS, which includes further details on how we will improve cancer diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes.