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 review the process of administering pain relief for Sickle Cell patients.

Specialist haemoglobinopathy teams and haemoglobinopathy co-ordinating centres are required to submit data via the Specialised Services Quality Dashboard on the percentage of patients given pain relief within 30 minutes of presentation with a sickle cell crisis, as per the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines. The data does not include patients attending non-specialist haemoglobinopathy providers and further work is required to improve the accuracy of the data submission before it can be used to assess compliance.

The National Sickle Pain Group, a sub-group of the Specialised Commissioning Haemoglobinopathies Clinical Reference Group, has produced guidance for hospitals to improve the care for sickle cell patients presenting with acute sickle pain and are working on an associated acute pain audit to measure the time to first analgesia universally across England.

NHS England has launched an end-to-end sickle cell clinical pathway review led by the Health Inequalities Improvement team. The end-to-end clinical pathway for patients with sickle cell disease is being reviewed to identify opportunities for delivering improvements.