Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to support people with motor neurone disease in Fylde constituency.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning most services for people with long-term conditions, including motor neurone disease (MND) services. ICBs are allocated funding by NHS England to meet local need and priorities, and improve outcomes. The NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB oversees healthcare services in the region, including in the Fylde area. NHS England continues to set national standards, service specifications, and clinical access policies, which ICBs are expected to apply.

At the national level, there are several initiatives supporting service improvement and better care for patients with MND, including those patients in the Fylde constituency. These initiatives include the Getting It Right First Time Programme for Neurology and the RightCare Progressive Neurological Conditions Toolkit. NHS England has also established a Neurology Transformation Programme, a multi-year, clinically led programme, which has developed a new model of integrated care to support ICBs to deliver the right service, at the right time for all neurology patients, including those with MND.

NHS England commissions the specialised elements of MND care that patients may receive from 27 specialised neurology centres across England. Within these specialised centres, neurological multidisciplinary teams ensure that patients can access a range of health professionals and specialised treatment and support, according to their needs.

Government responsibility for delivering MND research is shared between the Department of Health and Social Care, with research delivered via the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, with research delivered via UK Research and Innovation. Government funders are continuing to invest into MND research, for example: investing £12.5 million to support the best discovery science in MND at the UK Dementia Research Institute; £6 million of Government funding for the Motor Neurone Disease Translational Accelerator, which is seeking to speed up the development of treatments for MND; and £8 million investment into EXPERTS-ALS, which screens for drugs that have the potential to be successful in clinical trials for people with MND.