Asked by: Lord Kamall (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by the Minister for Veterans on 23 April 2025 (HC47398), what further progress they have made on the rollout of Programme Cortisone.
Answered by Lord Coaker - Minister of State (Ministry of Defence)
The vision for Programme CORTISONE is to deliver a sustainable, integrated, cohesive and enduring information capability to support the delivery of evidence-based medical and dental health and healthcare outputs.
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has awarded a £7.8 million contract to Leeds software company, The Phoenix Partnership to provide a modern electronic healthcare records system called SystmOne for the Armed Forces. This will digitalise military medical records and integrate MOD systems with the NHS.
Scheduled to begin its roll out in 2027, SystmOne is fully secure and compatible with the NHS, meaning that Service personnel will receive quick and seamless care between Defence and civilian health systems, including both new recruits and Service leavers transitioning in and out of the military.
It will replace outdated time-consuming processes for transfers of information between the NHS and the Defence Medical services, be more user-friendly and increase time to care for patients by improving clinical productivity and reducing the admin burden with a modern IT system.
The contract award aligns with the Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 which outlines a commitment to increase MOD spending with Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
Asked by: Lord Kamall (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assistance is available to people who are not sufficiently technologically proficient to use the NHS app.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are working to improve access to digital services, outcomes, and experiences for the widest range of people, based on their preferences. Digital health tools should be part of a wider offering that includes face-to-face support with appropriate help for people who struggle to access digital services.
Centrally built services, such as the NHS App and National Health Service website, are designed to meet international accessibility standards. We are modernising the mobile patient experience within the NHS App, ensuring information is clearly structured and easy to find and understand.
NHS England has successfully run several programmes to support patients, carers, and health service staff with their digital skills. These include:
the Digital Health Champions programme, a proof of concept to support citizens who have no or low digital skills with understanding how to access health services online;
the Widening Digital Participation programme, aimed to ensure more people have the digital skills, motivation, and means to access health information and services online; and
the NHS App ‘Spoken Word’ Pilot project, designed to test the efficacy of promoting NHS digital health products and services in languages other than English.
We have also recruited over 2,000 NHS App ambassadors and 1,400 libraries to help people to learn how to use the NHS App.
NHS England has published a framework for NHS action on digital inclusion and is developing further resources to support practical actions. All programmes are actively considering how they can contribute to improvements in healthcare inequalities and digital inclusion.
We are also developing a national proxy service to grant authorised access for people to manage health care on behalf of other people that are unable to use the NHS App.
Asked by: Lee Anderson (Reform UK - Ashfield)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase the (a) accessibility and (b) availability of functional MRI scans.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans can be taken on standard clinical MRI machines. However, whilst functional MRI requires specialised software to detect blood flow changes, the blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal, and sometimes extra equipment for stimuli, for instance goggles, it uses the same scanner hardware as structural MRI.
We are committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including MRI scanners.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26 to support delivery of the NHS performance standards. This funding will deliver replacement of the oldest MRI scanners in community diagnostic centres and acute hospital settings, as well as delivering MRI acceleration software. Business cases for the locations of these are being considered for approval.
Capital investment will be targeted to locations where it will enable the additional activity required to deliver the return to referral to treatment and cancer constitutional standards promised, as well as considering local levels of deprivation so that investment supports efforts to reduce health inequalities.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if his Department will review information on the NHS website regarding hamstring injuries to ensure it adequately reflects the potential severity of hamstring avulsion injuries and the possible need for surgical intervention.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Decisions on the need for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in the case of hamstring avulsion injuries are clinically led. The Department has not made an assessment of the adequacy of the relevant guidance.
The hamstring injury page on the NHS.UK website was recently reviewed against the latest clinical evidence and updated in July 2025. The current page does alert users to the potential for a hamstring injury to be severe and require surgery, and where and when to get medical help. NHS England routinely updates the NHS.UK website in line with clinical evidence to ensure individuals with a potential hamstring injury are provided with the latest clinical evidence.
The Department is committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including for MRI. NHS England is taking steps to support MRI services to remain resilient, effective, and able to meet growing demand. Over the past five years, significant capital investment has been deployed to strengthen service resilience, increase capacity, and improve patient access. This has included funding for new MRI assets, upgrading existing machines with MRI acceleration software, and supporting trusts in replacing failing or outdated systems.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26, some of which will deliver new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of guidance for NHS trusts on the urgent provision of MRI scans for patients with hamstring avulsion injuries.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Decisions on the need for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in the case of hamstring avulsion injuries are clinically led. The Department has not made an assessment of the adequacy of the relevant guidance.
The hamstring injury page on the NHS.UK website was recently reviewed against the latest clinical evidence and updated in July 2025. The current page does alert users to the potential for a hamstring injury to be severe and require surgery, and where and when to get medical help. NHS England routinely updates the NHS.UK website in line with clinical evidence to ensure individuals with a potential hamstring injury are provided with the latest clinical evidence.
The Department is committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including for MRI. NHS England is taking steps to support MRI services to remain resilient, effective, and able to meet growing demand. Over the past five years, significant capital investment has been deployed to strengthen service resilience, increase capacity, and improve patient access. This has included funding for new MRI assets, upgrading existing machines with MRI acceleration software, and supporting trusts in replacing failing or outdated systems.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26, some of which will deliver new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software.
Asked by: Lisa Smart (Liberal Democrat - Hazel Grove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to increase MRI scanning capacity in the NHS.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are committed to transforming diagnostic services and will support the National Health Service to increase diagnostic capacity to meet the demand for diagnostic services, including investment in new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. This will speed up waiting times for tests, a crucial part of reducing overall waiting times and returning to the referral to treatment 18-week standard.
The 2025 Spending Review confirmed over £6 billion of additional capital investment over five years across new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity. This includes £600 million in capital funding for diagnostics in 2025/26 to support delivery of the NHS performance standards. This funding will deliver new community diagnostic centres, including new MRI scanners, new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software.
Further details and allocations will be set out in due course.
Asked by: Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking, if any, to support the use of AI-enabled appointment and scheduling tools in the NHS.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The 10-Year Health Plan was published on 3 July 2025, which sets out how the Government will ensure the National Health Service is fit for the future, where artificial intelligence (AI) will play a fundamental role in this transformation. As part of the 10-Year Health Plan, the Government is supporting the use of AI-enabled appointment and scheduling tools to reduce the administrative burden on clinicians, with early trials showing an increase in productivity and clinician time saved.
An accident and emergency demand forecasting tool is now available to all NHS trusts and is already in use by 50 NHS organisations, helping them plan how many people are likely to need emergency care and treatment on any given day. While this tool does not schedule appointments specifically, it uses AI to predict emergency care demand, enabling trusts to plan staffing and resources more effectively and reduce pressure on services.
The NHS continues to fund both pilots and scaling of different software products that enable the use of AI in scheduling and managing secondary care appointments. Typically, these include the ability to predict Did Not Attends, to reschedule appointments at short notice, and improve utilisation of clinician time.
Work has begun to deliver the NHS’s Medium Term Planning Framework commitment that, from April 2026, the NHS will begin to move to a unified access model, using AI-assisted triage. This model should effectively guide patients to self-care or to the appropriate care setting, through a single user interface delivered via the NHS App but with an integrated telephony and in-person offering.
Further to this, features set to be developed through the NHS App will include the ability to book and manage remote or face-to-face appointments, receive personalised health advice, see when vaccines are up-to-date, and book appointments to get them organised, and find travel vaccine info.
Additionally, DrDoctor, an AI tool, had a three-year contract from 2021 to 2024 with the NHS AI Lab Award. It supports hospitals by providing AI guidance on overbooking as a more efficient and economical solution to increase NHS appointment capacity. This has been shown to free up clinician and administrative time, improve patient care and experience, and predict which patients are at the highest risk of missing an appointment with “Did Not Attend” DNA Prediction.
Asked by: Blake Stephenson (Conservative - Mid Bedfordshire)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the answer of 24 October 2025 to Written Question 75761, what criteria he uses to determine cost-effectiveness.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The criteria used to determine the cost-effectiveness of offering services in the NHS App is yet to be finalised, as scoping is at an early stage and will take place alongside the business planning process for the Spending Review period.
Asked by: Peter Swallow (Labour - Bracknell)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve patient experience of the NHS App.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The NHS App is at the forefront of a major digital transformation and will revolutionise access to healthcare by putting patients at the centre of a modern, personalised, and data-driven service. One of the key aims is to empower individuals with greater choice, transparency, and control over their care.
The NHS App is co-designed with patients from a wide range of background and needs, with 14,000 users involved in user research in 2025 alongside 42,000 survey completions. Our research teams also have a rule of always doing rounds of research with often excluded or disadvantaged groups. This is often facilitated by partners like the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Mencap who help us to involve the appropriate people.
The NHS App is already helping people manage their health more easily, whether that’s viewing records, booking appointments, ordering prescriptions, or accessing test results. In the past year alone, the app has sent over 181 million messages, supported over 32 million vaccination invites, and offered more than 16 million vaccination appointments, many in local pharmacies. These numbers show how the app is not just supporting care but actively shifting it closer to home.
By 2030, patients will be able to manage their care remotely, contribute to their health records, and navigate the system with confidence, driving better outcomes and a more integrated, responsive National Health Service.
Asked by: Helen Morgan (Liberal Democrat - North Shropshire)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when he plans to answer Question 90914 on NHS: Software.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
I refer the hon. Member to the answer I gave on 2 December 2025 to Question 90914.