Asthma: Health Services
(asked on 8th May 2024) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of access to (a) specialist care provision and (b) review for asthma patients.
Fewer than 5% of all people with asthma have severe asthma or uncontrolled asthma. For these people, systematic assessment by a specialist multidisciplinary severe asthma team has been shown to improve patient outcomes, for instance with a reduction in exacerbations and oral corticosteroids use, a reduction in health care utilisation, and an improvement in quality of life, regardless of the use of biologic drugs.
Severe asthma services form part of NHS England’s specialised commissioning responsibilities. Specialised respiratory services are subject to joint commissioning or delegation to integrated care boards from April 2024, which will support integrated pathways between specialised and non-specialised services. Recent work contributed to by NHS England, to support capacity within specialised severe asthma services, included the development of a severe asthma toolkit and an Accelerated Access Collaborative on improving pathways for identification and management of patients with severe asthma. Regular asthma reviews, at least annually, are recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence within its guideline on the diagnosis, monitoring, and chronic management of asthma.
The provision of annual asthma reviews is one of the indicators within the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) for general practices in England. The objective of the QOF is to improve the care patients are given by rewarding practices for the quality of care they provide to their patients, based on several indicators across a range of key areas of clinical care and public health. The latest published data for 2022/23 shows that 62.9% of people on the asthma register received a review in the past 12 months. This has steadily increased since 2020/21, the earliest date from which data is available, as this is when the indicator definition was updated. Further information on the public health profile of patients with asthma is available at the following link: