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27 Jan 2009 : Column 409W—continued
offering a range of locally-commissioned services that can benefit those with musculoskeletal conditions, such as stopping smoking, home delivery and full clinical medication reviews.
The White Paper, Pharmacy in England: Building on Strengths—delivering the future proposes to extend the range of services provided by pharmacies especially for people with long-term conditions including introducing a support service for people newly prescribed medicines for a long term condition within the community pharmacy contractual framework. Discussions will be held with NHS Employers and the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee to see how such a service can be incorporated into the framework.
NHS: ICT
Norman Lamb: To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many severity (a) one and (b) two incidents have been reported to Connecting for Health in each month since 2006. [250754]
Mr. Bradshaw: The information is in the following table.
| National application service providers (NASP) | Local service providers (LSPs) | |||
| Severity level 1 | Severity level 2 | Severity level 1 | Severity level 2 | |
These figures relate to incidents as they are reported. In practice and after investigation, many incidents are found to be local hardware, software or infrastructure problems, or they are re-categorised with the agreement of the user. The figures should therefore not be interpreted as being a reflection of system performance.
Performance figures are published on the NHS Connecting for Health website to show performance against service level agreements (SLAs). The actual performance against the SLAs shows a good service.
Some 91 per cent. of NASP severity 1 incidents, and some 94 per cent. of NASP severity 2 incidents in the table relate to reports relating to the NHS national broadband network (N3) where there are around 27,000 individual service connections against which incidents can be logged.
NICE: Weber-Shandwick
Mr. Hurd: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what payments the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has made to Weber-Shandwick for public (a) affairs and (b) relations work since its inception. [250235]
Dawn Primarolo: The information requested is not held centrally. Payments made by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to external companies are a matter for NICE as an independent body.
Personal Injury: Compensation
Mr. Todd: To ask the Secretary of State for Health on how many occasions the Compensation Recovery Unit challenged the statements of insurers and their agents on medical treatment in 2007-08; and if he will make a statement. [250680]
Mr. Bradshaw: As part of the administration of the NHS injury cost recovery scheme, the compensation recovery unit (CRU) is required to conduct compliance checks. CRU uses risk based sampling to identify cases to be challenged. In 2007-08, 60,440 of these checks were completed.
Pharmacy
Mr. Todd: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what discussions he has had with the Office of Fair Trading on follow-up work arising from the OFT’s investigation of control of entry regulations in the pharmacy market. [250933]
Phil Hope: The OFT report “The control of entry regulations and retail pharmacy services in the UK”, was published in January 2003. Since then, officials have had various meetings with the OFT to discuss matters of mutual interest.
The OFT gave evidence to a review led by Anne Galbraith, former chair of the Prescription Pricing Authority, in spring 2007. Her report “Review of NHS pharmaceutical contractual arrangements”, was published in April 2008 alongside the White Paper “Pharmacy in England: Building on strengths—delivering the future. A copy of the report has been placed in the Library and is also available at:
OFT and departmental officials have also met recently to discuss issues arising from the 2008 pharmacy White Paper consultation “Pharmacy in England: Building on strengths—delivering the future—proposals for legislative reform”.
Mr. Todd: To ask the Secretary of State for Health (1) what steps he plans to take to link primary care trusts’ pharmaceutical needs assessments to strategic planning and commissioning processes; [250934]
(2) what steps his Department has taken to ensure that each primary care trust area has an up-to-date pharmaceutical needs assessment in place. [250935]
Phil Hope: The White Paper “Pharmacy in England: Building on strengths—delivering the future” highlighted that primary care trust pharmaceutical needs assessments should contribute to joint strategic needs assessments, which all PCTs and upper-tier local authorities have a duty to undertake. The support programme on pharmaceutical needs assessment being devised for PLTs, led by NHS Employers, is expected to include guidance on linking joint strategic needs assessment and pharmaceutical needs assessment.
Following publication of the White Paper, the Department asked NHS Employers to set up a short-term working group to review requirements for pharmaceutical needs assessments and to develop a support programme for primary care trusts. The first element of this programme—“Pharmaceutical Needs Assessments (PNAs) as part of world class commissioning—Guidance for primary care trusts”, was published on 7 January 2009. A copy has been placed in the Library and it is also available at:
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