Tag: Baroness Grey-Thompson

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Grey-Thompson on 2016-02-03.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how much NHS England spent on the purchase of wheelchairs in England in the last year for which figures are available.

Lord Prior of Brampton

Information on the cost of operating wheelchair services in England is not available centrally. Such information as is available is from reference costs, which are the average unit costs to National Health Service trusts and foundation trusts of providing defined services to patients. The total cost of operating wheelchair services reported in 2014-15 reference costs was £143.4 million.

NHS England advises that as clinical commissioning groups are responsible for commissioning wheelchair services, it does not collect data on how much is spent on the purchase of wheelchairs. NHS England is however supporting improvement in wheelchair services and has just established a new national data collection. This will enable tracking at local and national levels of issues such as the number of wheelchair users, the costs of services and the length of time people have to wait.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Grey-Thompson on 2016-02-02.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what was the cost of operating wheelchair services in England in the last year for which figures are available.

Lord Prior of Brampton

Information on the cost of operating wheelchair services in England is not available centrally. Such information as is available is from reference costs, which are the average unit costs to National Health Service trusts and foundation trusts of providing defined services to patients. The total cost of operating wheelchair services reported in 2014-15 reference costs was £143.4 million.

NHS England advises that as clinical commissioning groups are responsible for commissioning wheelchair services, it does not collect data on how much is spent on the purchase of wheelchairs. NHS England is however supporting improvement in wheelchair services and has just established a new national data collection. This will enable tracking at local and national levels of issues such as the number of wheelchair users, the costs of services and the length of time people have to wait.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Grey-Thompson on 2016-02-02.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many of the responses received on the NHS mandate consultation asked for an improvement in wheelchair services.

Lord Prior of Brampton

At least 170 responses were received that called for improvements to National Health Service wheelchair services. It should be noted that due to limitations in the analysis of large volumes of unstructured e-mail data received during the consultation it is possible that this is an under-estimate.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Grey-Thompson on 2016-03-11.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what involvement the Department for Work and Pensions has had with disabled people and their families to inform their thinking on the forthcoming white paper on improving support for disabled people and people with health conditions.

Baroness Altmann

The department regularly engages with disability charities and organisations, as well as disabled people and their families and carers, at both Ministerial and official level. We proactively seek stakeholder views on current health, care and employment services to understand what works and where improvements can be made through roundtables, focus groups and face-to-face meetings. These discussions inform and provide the opportunity to test our thinking as we being to develop proposals for the forthcoming White Paper, and we will continue to engage at all levels over the coming months.