Virendra Sharma – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Virendra Sharma on 2014-04-30.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average waiting time is for a decision on an individual funding request for the prescription of Duodopa to a patient with Parkinson’s disease.

Norman Lamb

Prior to April 2013, primary care trusts were responsible for dealing with individual funding requests and information on individual funding request decisions, or on the time taken to consider such requests, was not collected centrally.

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 informed us that information on the number of individual funding requests made to NHS England is not currently available. NHS England is improving its data collection mechanisms and aims to improve availability of such information in the future.

NHS England has advised us it aims to inform the requesting clinician of the outcome of the individual funding request panel decision within 40 working days from the date of receipt of a completed request form. There are no plans to collect information on the average time taken for these decisions to be made.