Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to publicise the innovation scorecard to (a) NHS organisations and (b) members of the public.

The Innovation Scorecard supports appropriate access to National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) positively appraised products (medicines, devices and diagnostics), by giving health and care commissioners and professionals information they can use to identify and act on unwarranted variation in patient access to these treatments. It covers the uptake of medicines approved by NICE since 2011 and medical technologies.

It is published quarterly by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) and is available to all. A calendar of future publications is available on the HSCIC website, in accordance with the UK Statistics Authority Code of Practice for Official Statistics. The most recent version of the publication can be found here:

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB18515

The Department is working very closely with the HSCIC, NHS England and others to extend coverage of the Scorecard and make it more user-friendly, to maximise its benefit for clinicians, patients and others.

Notification of each publication is made via a range of clinical and NHS networks, and via the regional medical directors. The media team at the HSCIC report all publications to national media.