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 help reduce the time taken for patients to be fitted with prosthetics.

The Government is committed to putting patients first. This means making sure that patients are seen on time, and ensuring that people have the best possible experience during their care, including patients awaiting a prosthetic fitting.

Following amputation, patients are referred to their local prosthetic centre for a limb fitting assessment and ongoing care. As part of the patients' assessment, a clinical judgement will be made to ensure the wound is healed in advance of a prosthetic limb being fitted. This timescale varies depending on individual patient clinical circumstances.

Once a patient is assessed as clinically ready for a prosthesis, they should be scanned or cast within two weeks, and receive their socket and prosthesis within four weeks from the date of the scan or casting. The national service specification has recently been reviewed, and the updated version is expected to be published in 2025. This is expected to include metrics which can be used to monitor the quality of care, such as the time between the date of the scan or casting and the patients receiving their socket and prosthesis.

The majority of prosthetics will be fitted in outpatient settings, and the vast majority of elective care takes place in an outpatient setting, so it is a top priority to ensure that those services are delivered efficiently, in a timely way, and that they prioritise patient experience. To tackle waiting lists, we will also deliver an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments per week during our first year in Government as a first step in our commitment to ensuring that patients can expect to be treated within 18 weeks. We will be supporting National Health Service trusts to deliver these through innovation, sharing best practice to increase productivity and efficiency, and ensuring the best value is delivered.