Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what evidence they have of unrelieved symptom distress in patients when care assistants are prohibited from administering prescribed medication at home; and how many errors have been recorded when care assistants have administered prescribed breakthrough medication in the patient's home.

Good practice for homecare is set out in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) guidance, which can be found on the NICE’s website, in an online only format.

Services need to submit statutory notifications to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) when a medicines incident reaches a specific threshold. This includes an allegation of abuse, the death of a person, an incident reported to or investigated by the police, or a serious injury.

Data on anything that does not constitute the CQC threshold is not held by the CQC, but may be held by individual providers as a recorded incident.