Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many times homecare medicines were not delivered on the initial date agreed by the clinician in the last year for which figures are available; how many patients required further medical treatment, including hospitalisation, due to delays in the supply of homecare medicines in that period; and how many patients required surgery due to delays in the delivery of medicines for (1) Crohn's disease, and (2) Colitis.

NHS England collects data in respect of the first question 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. No patient level data is collected against each of the framework agreements and admissions data is not linked to homecare systems data. This reason for admission would also need to be coded correctly within the hospital records.

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.