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 to implement benchmarking measures to ensure access to care for people with (a) respiratory conditions and (b) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in England.

NHS England continues to focus on ensuring that respiratory data is readily available to all regions and systems and to ensuring that there is consistency of data, definitions, and metrics to enable meaningful comparison, monitoring of progress, and to identify population needs.

Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) works with professional bodies, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and clinicians to define and co-produce evidence-informed, best-practice clinical pathways and uses data to identify unwarranted operational or clinical variation. It provides data for continuous improvement via the Model Health System and bespoke data packs. Further information on GIRFT’s respiratory best practice guidance is available at the following link:

https://gettingitrightfirsttime.co.uk/medical_specialties/respiratory/

NHS England has established a national respiratory dashboard on the new Federated Data Platform which provides analysis and insight for the National Health Service on a growing range of treatment and outcome measures for respiratory disease. This includes bringing in data from the National Respiratory Audit Programme, a continuous audit of respiratory care co-funded by NHS England which aims to improve the quality of the care, services, and clinical outcomes for patients with respiratory disease across England and Wales. The audit is provided by the Royal College of Physicians and further information can be found on its website, at the following link:

https://www.rcp.ac.uk/improving-care/national-clinical-audits/the-national-respiratory-audit-programme-nrap/