Julie Morgan (Cardiff North, Labour)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health

(1) what proportion of primary care trusts in England are part of a local multi-disciplinary clinical network for tuberculosis;

(2) what steps the NHS takes to assign consultants with appropriate experience to the care of patients with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.

Gillian Merron (Minister of State (Public Health), Department of Health; Lincoln, Labour)

The organisation of local national health service services and ensuring appropriate experience of consultants treating multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), and the organisation of local multi-disciplinary networks is a matter for local NHS management.

In recognising that many TB clinicians will not have experienced treating an MDR case, the Department funded the British Thoracic Society (BTS) initially to form a national advice network to offer advice and share good practice on treating MDR cases. We also recommend in the TB Toolkit for commissioners and service providers published in June 2007 that MDR-TB cases be discussed within this group and advice should be sought on a regular basis on continuing patient management.

Advice is provided through a virtual community of TB experts, including chest physicians, infectious disease physicians, paediatricians, public health physicians, a specialist nurse and four directors of the health protection agency laboratories where drug sensitivity for tuberculosis is undertaken (Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff and London).

In forming the advice network, The BTS extended the remit to include all aspects of TB, and not just MDR-TB. The TB Toolkit also recommends that in low incidence areas where fewer that 10 cases per year are seen for case management to be discussed on a multidisciplinary team basis. The BTS network is available to anyone that wishes to access it.

The all party parliamentary group on Global TB published the results of two surveys of TB nursing staff and TB consultants in July 2009. They found that 68 per cent. of the respondents from TB consultants indicate that the acute trusts they work for is part of a TB network.