PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Diagnosis (25 February 2021)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuit to the Answer of 24 February 2021 to Question 141963, in what format his Department and NHS England collects data on the average time for a patient with (a) Crohn’s disease and (b) ulcerative colitis to be diagnosed in Harrow East constituency compared to the national average in the last 12 months.

Asked by:
Bob Blackman (Conservative)

NHS England and NHS Improvement have advised that their current outpatient systems are a generic list of patients waiting without a diagnosis and are measured from a previous appointment to the first outpatient appointment or diagnostic procedure. As a patient may be seen by several consultants before diagnosis, many with differing waiting times, we do not hold specific information on average wait times for people diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

In addition, NHS England and NHS Improvement have advised that information is not held at a constituency level as figures are collected working to general practitioner practice boundaries that do not align with constituency boundaries.

Answered by:
Edward Argar (Conservative)
12 March 2021