Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking with devolved governments to help ensure the equal provision of NICE-approved treatments across the UK for (a) advanced and (b) complex Parkinson’s disease.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) makes recommendations on whether new medicines should be routinely funded by the National Health Service in England. Health is a devolved matter and decisions on the availability of medicines is a matter for the respective devolved administrations. The NICE has agreements with the devolved administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland to make its products, including guidelines, technology appraisals, and highly specialised technologies guidance, available to them, and works with organisations to help put its guidance into practice through its system implementation team.

The Government has recently relaunched the Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway, which is a unique initiative that aims to accelerate the time to patient care for transformative new medicines and drug-device combinations, facilitating patient access by providing a single integrated platform for sustained collaborative working between the developer, the regulator, the Health Technology Assessment bodies across the United Kingdom, the NHS, and patients.