Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 13 April 2016 to Question 32720, what recent assessment he has made of the effect of the removal of quality and outcomes framework indicators EP002 and EP003 on the number of avoidable epilepsy deaths.

As part of the 2013/14 negotiations with the British Medical Association’s General Practitioners Committee on changes to the General Practice (GP) contract, NHS England agreed to seek to simplify the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF). The aim was to remove unnecessarily prescriptive requirements for clinical practice and to give GPs greater flexibility in adapting clinical care to reflect the needs of individual patients.

The retirement of the epilepsy QOF indicators does not mean that patients will cease to receive advice on medication. It is normal clinical practice for GPs to counsel and/or refer patients for pre-conception advice. We would expect GPs to continue to record on their clinical systems where they have provided advice to patients and we intend to continue to collect this information from GP clinical systems so that it can be reported in the interests of transparency.