Disability: Children

(asked on 21st November 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to improve the quality of health and social care services for disabled children.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 28th November 2018

In 2014, the Government introduced a new statutory framework requiring local authorities and clinical commissioning groups to commission jointly services for children with special educational needs and disability, across health, social care and education. Since 2014, £327 million has been given to local areas to support implementation of these new arrangements, in addition to the high needs budget for placements for pupils with complex special educational needs.

In addition to their role inspecting providers, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission are jointly inspecting every local area’s arrangements. The inspections assess the effectiveness of joint arrangements by commissioners of health, education and social care to support children with special educational needs, with written statements of action required where improvement is needed.

Improving wheelchair access for children has been included as a ‘must do’ in NHS England’s planning guidance for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) for 2017/18 – 2018/19, which was issued in September 2016. Each CCG is required to set out improvement plans showing how they would halve the number of children waiting 18 weeks by Q4 2017/18 and eliminate 18 week waits for wheelchairs by the end of 2018/19.

In April 2018, we announced investment of £1.5 million in child sports prostheses across 2018/19 and 2019/20 for the provision of child sports protheses and research.

In 2019 we will be consulting on introducing mandatory learning disability training for health and care staff.

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