Virendra Sharma – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Virendra Sharma on 2016-09-06.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answers of 22 January 2016 to Question 22462 and 28 June 2016 to Question 40748, when NHS England plans to publish findings from its review of individual funding requests for palivizumab; whether that review will include details of the number of individual funding requests submitted, accepted and declined; and what the reason is for the time taken to publish the findings from that review.

Mr Philip Dunne

NHS England has advised that, due to issues with patient identifiable information, it has not been possible to analyse the information on individual funding requests (IFRs) for palivizumab in detail at this stage.

However, NHS England has advised that 57 IFR requests were received between August 2015 and January 2016 and that 11 (19%) were approved and 16 (28%) were rejected as they were outside the age range criteria. The remaining 30 were declined for a range of conditions that are not normally associated with respiratory syncytial virus.

NHS England has issued a circular to its specialised commissioning teams and to providers of neonatal services, congenital heart services and specialised respiratory services outlining its 2016 commissioning position.