Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to collect data on (a) the number of patients who are required to return to hospital for a review or follow-up out-patient appointment or procedure and (b) the length of time between such patients' initial appointment and that review or follow-up appointment.

Such data are already collected in Hospital Episode Statistics, a data warehouse managed by the Health and Social Care Information Centre that includes details of all admissions and outpatient appointments at National Health Service and independent sector hospitals in England. A summary report of the data published for 2014-15 is at:

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB19608/hosp-outp-acti-2014-15-summ-repo-rep.pdf

Information on length of time between first and follow-up appointments has not been published because there are no national standards for the appropriate intervals, which will vary between different services or specialties, and between individual patients, depending on the severity of the condition and clinical decision making.