Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how NHS England's evaluation through commissioning programme will align with the Accelerated Access Review and the test bed programme outlined in the NHS five year forward review.

NHS England has stated that the Commissioning through Evaluation programme is aligned to both the ambitions of the Accelerated Access Review and NHS England’s ‘test bed’ innovation proposals in that it aims to provide faster access to new and systematically generated evaluative data to inform decisions on clinical commissioning policy, particularly in areas where properly constructed research is either unlikely or impossible.

NHS England’s operating model, in which single national clinical commissioning policies and service specifications are developed and published following significant clinical and patient engagement, provides a unique opportunity to identify and quickly and consistently disseminate innovative changes in clinical practice for specialised services to the benefit of patients across England.