Asked by: Layla Moran (Liberal Democrat - Oxford West and Abingdon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether her Department is taking steps to bring waiting times for mental health patients in-line with waiting times for physical health patients.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
We remain committed to achieving parity between mental and physical health services, as outlined in the parity of esteem definition set out in a letter to the Public Accounts Committee in February 2024.
Given funding is important for reaching parity of esteem, we are making good progress with investment in National Health Service mental health services. Between 2018/19 and 2023/24, NHS spending on mental health has increased by £4.7 billion in cash terms, as compared to the target of £3.4 billion in cash terms set out at the time of the Long-Term Plan. For 2024/25, mental health spend is forecast to continue to grow, and will make up 9.01% of all recurrent NHS spending.
In February 2022, NHS England published the outcomes of its consultation on the potential to introduce five new access and waiting time standards for mental health services, as part of its clinically led review of NHS Access Standards. These are: for an urgent referral to a community based mental health crisis service, a patient should be seen within 24 hours of referral, across all ages; for a very urgent referral to a community based mental health crisis service, a patient should be seen within four hours of referral, for all age groups; patients referred from accident and emergency should be seen face to face within one hour by a mental health liaison or children and young people’s equivalent service; children, young people and their families and carers presenting to community-based mental health services, should start to receive care within four weeks of referral; and adults and older adults presenting to community-based mental health services should start to receive help within four weeks of referral.
Asked by: Mick Whitley (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment her Department has made of the adequacy of support available to adults with complex mental health needs.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
Through the NHS Long Term plan, the Government is providing record levels of investment, and increasing the mental health workforce, to expand and transform National Health Service mental health services in England. Almost £16 billion was invested into mental health in 2022/23, enabling 3.6 million people to be in contact with mental health services.
As part of this, we’re set to reach nearly £1 billion of additional funding invested by 2023/24, to transform community mental health services. This is the largest area of investment within the NHS Long Term Plan for mental health, aiming to support more people with the care that is most appropriate for their needs, and that is integrated between primary and community mental health services. Over the last full financial year, 2022/23, 288,000 adults and older adults with severe mental illness were able to access mental health support through these new models.
The safety and care of mental health patients is of paramount importance. Those with complex mental health needs in an inpatient mental health facility deserve to receive safe, high-quality care, and to be treated with dignity and respect.
NHS England has established a Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Inpatient Quality Transformation Programme. This programme is working to support cultural change and a new model of care for the future, across all NHS-funded mental health, learning disability, and autism inpatient settings.
The ambition is to increasingly shift mental healthcare towards early intervention and prevention, with treatment primarily delivered in the community. This includes increasing the number of personalised care roles, such as peer support workers, with expansion focused on mental health services where need is greatest.
Asked by: Baroness Merron (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what actions they have taken in response to the Medical Research Council's UK primary care-based ‘Screening for Osteoporosis in Older People’ trial.
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government has not taken any specific action in response to the Medical Research Council's primary care-based trial, Screening for Osteoporosis in Older People. However, there are actions that the Government is taking more generally, to support people with osteoporosis and increase early diagnosis.
The Government is working to set up 160 community diagnostic centres (CDCs) across the country by March 2024. Some of these CDCs will offer bone density scans which can be used to diagnose or assess patients’ risk of osteoporosis. Our ambition is that 95% of patients needing a diagnostic check will receive it within six weeks, by March 2025.
On 24 January 2023, we announced our plan to publish the Major Conditions Strategy. The strategy will focus on six major groups of conditions, including musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders such as osteoporosis. We have since published our initial report Major conditions strategy: case for change and our strategic framework, which is available on the GOV.UK website, in an online only format. For MSK conditions such as osteoporosis, it sets out our aims to improve services where medical treatment is necessary. Together with NHS England, we will explore supporting the further provision of fracture liaison services. This could include identifying people at risk of further osteoporotic fragility fractures and implementing strategies to reduce the risk of future fractures, including from falls, and mortality.
Valuable research work is also being funded by the Department, through the National Institute of Health and Care Research, which has awarded £173 million to research into MSK conditions in the last five years.
The UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) last reviewed the evidence to screen for osteoporosis in postmenopausal women in 2019, recommending that a population screening programme should not be introduced. The review identified that there were key areas of uncertainty around the test and treatment and that further research was needed. The research showed that screening all women for osteoporosis does not reduce the number of fractures compared to current care.
The UK NSC can be alerted to any new published peer-reviewed evidence which may suggest the case for a new screening programme via its annual call, which will open in July 2024.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she is taking steps with Cabinet colleagues to target support to people with adverse childhood experiences to prevent alcohol harm.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Evidence suggests that adverse childhood experiences are often intergenerational, and while people with adverse childhood experiences are more likely to have grown up in a household where one or both parents were alcohol dependent compared to the general population, their children are also more likely to develop alcohol problems as they get older.
This is why we are investing in vital services to be at the heart of local offers for families. Not only do these services play a pivotal role in keeping more children safe from adverse experiences, with stable loving relationships, they can also help overcome multiple, complex problems within families before they escalate.
We have committed to £1 billion of funding for programmes to improve early help support. This includes around £300 million to fund a new three-year Family Hubs and Start for Life programme. This programme, now in its second year, is delivering a step-change in outcomes for babies, children, parents and carers in 75 local authorities in England with high deprivation. This funding also includes an additional £695 million for the Supporting Families programme, which builds the resilience of vulnerable families by providing effective support for all their underlying and interconnected problems, such as addressing alcohol harms and other adverse childhood experiences.
We are investing at least £2.3 billion of additional funding a year by March 2024, compared to 2018/19, to expand and transform mental health services in England so that two million more people, including those with adverse childhood experiences, can get the mental health support that they need. We are also rolling out mental health support teams to schools and colleges across England. The Government is also investing an extra £532 million for local authorities to improve alcohol and drug treatment and recovery services through Drug Strategy funding through to 2024/25. Local authorities are encouraged to develop programmes which provide tailored support to families affected by parental alcohol and drug use with this funding.
Asked by: Chris Green (Conservative - Bolton West)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the report entitled The Impact of Care Act Easements published by the University of Manchester and the NIHR Older People and Frailty Policy Research Unit in November 2022, what steps her Department is taking to support local authorities in identifying hidden older carers within their communities.
Answered by Helen Whately - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Under the Care Act 2014, local authorities are required to undertake a Carer’s Assessment for any unpaid carer who appears to have need for support, and to meet their eligible needs upon request from the carer.
On 24 October 2023, the adult social care’s Innovation and Improvement Unit launched the Accelerating Reform Fund which provides a total of £42.6 million over 2023/24 and 2024/25 to support innovation and scaling in adult social care, and to kick start a change in services to support unpaid carers. The list of priorities for innovation and scaling includes focussing on identifying unpaid carers in local areas, encouraging people to recognise themselves as carers, and promoting access to carer services.
The adult social care reform white paper, People at the Heart of Care, published on 1 December 2021, highlighted the potential to increase the voluntary use of unpaid carer markers in National Health Service electronic health records. In 2022, NHS England wrote to all general practices about the importance of identifying carers and advising how caring status should be recorded on patient records.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, what recent steps the Government has taken to help improve access to healthcare for older people in the Global South.
Answered by Andrew Mitchell - Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) (Minister for Development)
The UK is committed to championing universal health coverage (UHC) - for the young and the old. We worked with other countries to ensure that the 2023 UN Political Declaration on UHC reaffirmed the 2019 commitment to promote healthy and active ageing and to respond to the needs of ageing populations. We also went further, recognising the importance of providing sustainable home and community care services for older people. We continue to work with country and global partners including the World Health Organization on integrated and equitable approaches to strengthening health systems and achieving UHC for all.
Asked by: Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of the budget of NHS Continuing Healthcare and NHS funded Nursing Care is spent on pensioners.
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England does not collect data on how much NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC) and National Health Service-funded Nursing Care funding is spent on ‘pensioners’, defined here as someone who is in receipt of a pension. Determination of CHC eligibility is based on a comprehensive assessment of care needs rather than any specific medical condition, disease or diagnosis.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has made a recent assessment of trends in the level of sexually transmitted diseases in (a) men and (b) women.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The UK Health Security Agency publishes annual official statistics on sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and in 2022 there were 392,453 new diagnoses of STIs in local government commissioned sexual health services England, an increase of 23.8% compared to 2021 with 317,022, but 16.2% lower compared to 2019 with 468,260. This increase can be partially explained by the recovery in provision of sexual health services in 2022 following the easing of restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. New STI diagnoses increased by 19% from 140,671 to 167,390 in women, and by 24% in men from 164,022 to 202,605 from 2021 to 2022.
STIs continue to show socioeconomic variation and disproportionately impact gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, young people aged between 15 and 24 years old and some black ethnic groups. Young people aged between 15 and 24 years old remain the group most likely to be diagnosed with common STIs, and this may be due to higher rates of partner change among people aged between 16 and 24 years old. Young women may be more likely to be diagnosed with an STI due to an increased likelihood of them having male partners who are older than them.
Official STI statistics for 2022 are available at the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/sexually-transmitted-infections-stis-annual-data-tables
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many ICBs have introduced self-referral routes for (a) fall services, (b) musculoskeletal services, (c) audiology for older people, (d) weight management services, (e) community podiatry and (f) wheelchair and community equipment as of 12 November 2023.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care asked systems to expand self-referral in seven community-based services from September 2023. By that time, integrated care boards (ICBs) reported over 600 services offering self-referral routes which is a 31% increase from August 2023, with expansion taking place across all seven service areas.
We are continuing to support ICBs expand further via a range of activities including communities of practice to share experiences and learning across the country.
Asked by: Justin Tomlinson (Conservative - North Swindon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what specialist service provision the NHS provides for people with (a) psychosis and schizophrenia, (b) eating disorders and (c) bipolar.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
The NHS Long Term Plan committed £1 billion of extra funding per year to transform and expand community mental health services. By the end of 2023/24, it is expected that 370,000 adults and older adults with severe mental health problems will be supported within newly transformed models of care in line with the Community Mental Health Framework.
The Community Mental Health Framework is applicable to people irrespective of their diagnosis, aiming to reorganise community mental health services to provide comprehensive holistic care and treatment to give them greater choice and control over their care and support them to live well in their communities.
As part of this new integrated offer, systems are supported to develop specialist services for adult eating disorders and early intervention for psychosis, while the expansion of psychological therapies includes extending the specific treatments people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Therefore, through expansion of community-based services, adults with severe mental health problems will be able to access treatment earlier, and closer to home, leading to better outcomes for them and their families.