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 cohesion between NHS Trust areas to ensure that patients who move to different NHS Trust areas do not lose access to services they previously received in other areas.

NHS England has advised that in all cases, the originating clinical commissioning group (CCG) should liaise at the earliest opportunity with the receiving CCG to ensure continuity of healthcare and to agree appropriate transfers of funding. Where a patient moves during the course of treatment, every effort should be made to ensure continuity of care.

Guidance issued to CCGs sets out the framework for determining responsibility for payments to providers and responsibility for commissioning an individual's care within the National Health Service. The guidance can be found at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/who-pays.pdf