Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the current and future demand for homecare medicines services; how many patients have accessed homecare medicines services in each of the last five years, both in total and broken down by (1) region of England, and (2) type of condition; how many of these were classed as active patients.

The Homecare Medicines sector has delivered services to an increasing number of patients within the National Health Service in recent years and the demand for convenient ways of accessing medicines is expected to continue.

The National Clinical Homecare Association collates data and estimates approximately 500,000 patients are in receipt of a homecare medicines service in England. However, these figures have not been validated by the NHS.

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.