David Amess – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Amess on 2014-06-13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the time and resources that clinicians spend on administering individual funding requests for treatments of Parkinson’s disease and other progressive conditions; and if he will make a statement.

Norman Lamb

We have made no such assessment.

From April 2013, NHS England assumed responsibility for commissioning adult specialist neurosciences services, including the majority of services for patients with Parkinson’s disease, with some being the responsibility of clinical commissioning groups.

NHS England has advised that it does not routinely fund Duodopa (co-careldopa) for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and is currently considering its clinical policy.

Clinicians can submit individual funding requests for this treatment on behalf of their patients as per NHS England’s individual funding requests standard operating procedure, which is at:

www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cp-04.pdf

This process is monitored against the standard operating procedure to ensure that referring clinicians are informed of outcomes in a timely manner.

Once the commissioning position relating to this service area is agreed and service access criteria published, NHS England has advised that the number of individual funding requests from clinicians may reduce.