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 help ensure that hospitals provide (a) (i) access to specialist support and (ii) appropriate medication management for people with Parkinson's disease and (c) staff training in Parkinson’s-specific needs.

NHS England has established a Neurology Transformation Programme, a multi-year, clinically led programme, which has developed a new model of integrated care to support integrated care boards (ICBs) to deliver the right service, at the right time for all neurology patients, including those with Parkinson’s. This focuses on providing access equitably across the country, care as close to home as possible, and early intervention to prevent illness and deterioration in patients with long-term neurological conditions. A toolkit is being developed to support ICBs to understand and implement this new model, which will include components on delivering acute neurology services, improving health equity in neurology, and improving community neurology services.

Hospital providers are responsible for ensuring that patients within hospital settings, including those with Parkinson’s, receive the appropriate medication on time, and that there are a variety of different mechanisms that can be used to support timely administration. These include:

• training on time critical medications, which is part of the delivery of safe and effective medicine optimisation, through the operation of each organisation’s medicines policy;

• electronic prescribing and medicines administration, which continues to be rolled out in the National Health Service in England. This is recognised to be essential to record compliance with time critical medications; and

• self-administration, which may help some patients, following a shared risk assessment and where providers have the space and facilities to offer patients personalised secure storage for their medicines and where there is facility to monitor when doses have been taken independently.

Furthermore, NHS England is leading the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme, as part of the wider NHS Patient Safety Strategy. A focus on time critical medicines has been agreed as a priority for this programme and work is underway involving 80 NHS trusts, with 48 of them receiving active support for innovation and improvement.

The Government is committed to publishing a 10 Year Workforce Plan which will ensure the NHS has the right people in the right places, with the right skills to care for patients, when they need it, including for patients with Parkinson’s.