Skin Diseases: Health Services

(asked on 11th December 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to help reduce the time taken for patients with inflammatory skin conditions to access (a) specialist care and support and (b) treatment.


Answered by
Andrew Stephenson Portrait
Andrew Stephenson
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 19th December 2023

Cutting waiting lists is one of the Government’s top priorities. We are making good progress on tackling the longest waits, to ensure that patients get the care they need when they need it.

We are taking action to recover elective services, including for patients waiting for National Health Service dermatology services, by working towards the targets set out in the Elective Recovery Plan and providing the NHS with record levels of staffing and funding. To facilitate this across the NHS in England, we are: increasing activity, with plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25; expanding capacity though creating a new network of community diagnostic centres; and maximising all available independent sector capacity. We are managing demand through specialised advice in primary care and giving patients more control over where they receive their care, and we are increasing productivity through transforming outpatient services, developing new surgical hubs to increase theatre productivity and working actively with trusts to support and challenge on their performance.

No specific assessment has been made of the potential impact of implementing NHS England’s referral optimisation for people with skin conditions on the cost of treatment and the number of referrals for people with skin conditions in England, Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care System or Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust.

The aim of referral optimisation is to triage referrals using electronic means, so that those with less serious problems can be offered rapid advice by their general practitioner (GP). This has the potential to create efficiencies by offering people with disabling skin problems rapid treatment to get them back to work and functioning at home quickly. Ensuring only those patients with the most serious conditions are sent to hospital will help to reduce waiting lists and ensure NHS hospital resources are used for those most likely to benefit most.

It is important that integrated care systems work with both GPs and hospitals to monitor referral numbers and ensure that the benefits of electronic triage are not outweighed by increased demand.

Reticulating Splines