Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they will take to ensure that integrated care boards are providing sufficient suitable wheelchairs in all parts of the country to enable wheelchair users, particularly children, to access one without delay.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of local wheelchair services, including children’s wheelchair services, and the development of their local wheelchair service eligibility criteria, based on the needs of their local population. NHS England supports ICBs to commission effective, efficient, and personalised wheelchair services.

NHS England is taking a number of steps to reduce regional variation in the quality and provision of National Health Service wheelchairs, and to support ICBs to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment. These include:

• establishing a national wheelchair dataset, as data has been collected quarterly from Clinical Commissioning Groups, now ICBs, since July 2015, which looks at waiting times at the various stages across the pathway to enable targeted action if improvement is required, to support the drive for improvements in wheelchair services;
• developing wheelchair currencies, with wheelchair currencies having been developed by NHS England to offer a structured way for providers, commissioners, and systems to understand the complexity of a patient population and to support commissioning conversations;
• introducing personal wheelchair budgets and legal rights for people, which offers a clear framework to commission personalised wheelchair services which are outcomes focused and integrated; and
• co-producing a wheelchair quality framework, which is being co-produced with key stakeholders and people with lived experience, is due to be published by the end of the financial year 2024/25, and will set out quality standards and statutory requirements for ICBs, such as offering personal wheelchair budgets.