Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average time taken by NHS England is to process (a) individual funding requests and (b) clinically critically urgent funding applications; and whether there is a mechanism to expedite this process for time-sensitive preventative treatments.

NHS England has advised that from 1 December 2014 to 30 November 2015 (latest figures available), it has taken an average of 17 days to process and respond to individual funding requests (IFRs) and 11 days to process and respond to funding requests for clinically critically urgent cases.

NHS England has standard operating frameworks for the management of IFRs and also for funding requests for clinically critically urgent treatment outside established policy which both outline the process and timelines for dealing with such requests. Both documents are available at:

www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/policies/gp/

The standing operating framework for IFRs is currently being updated. As part of the changes, the average target timeframe for responding to such requestswill be amended to 30 days from the current 40 days. The system for processing and decision making is also being altered to improve responsiveness as a whole.