Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many patients are currently in receipt of homecare medicines services; what is the total cost to the NHS of homecare medicines services for the latest year for which figures are available; and what is the total number of (1) late deliveries, (2) incorrect deliveries, and (3) deliveries without the required attendance of a healthcare professional.

The National Clinical Homecare Association (NCHA) collates data and estimates approximately 500,000 patients are in receipt of a homecare medicines service in England with an estimated annual value of £3.2 billion. However, these figures have not been validated by the National Health Service.

To monitor industry trends, providers provide the same data set to the NCHA, allowing for the aggregation of all providers metrics. The NCHA reports that delivery performance of providers (delivery to patients on the agreed date) was 99.0% in 2020; 98.6% in 2021; and 98.8% in 2022.

NHS England collects data for its national framework agreements; however, it is not in a readily accessible form for analysis and would require significant manual review and analysis to provide. Arrangements for future reporting are being worked on and NHS England is undertaking a piece of work to understand the issues in homecare, so as to inform future improvement actions. A project by the National Homecare Medicines Committee to review the national Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) set is already underway with consultation due later this summer and final documents expected for approval in December 2023. Publication of performance against these KPIs is part of this project.