General Practitioners
Health

Tessa Munt (Wells, Liberal Democrat)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health whether commissioning bodies funding specialist services are obliged to consider patient choice when considering funding applications.

Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, Conservative)

Currently legal directions issued alongside the NHS constitution require primary care trusts to ensure that patients have a right to choice when they are referred for their first consultant-led outpatient appointment. This is enabled by choose and book, which is an electronic referral and booking system that primary care health professionals can use when offering patients choice of specialist consultant-led outpatient appointments.

As a result of the Government health care reforms, from April 2013 the NHS Commissioning Board will be responsible for commissioning specialist services and will be required to have regard to the duties set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2012. The Act requires the NHS Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups to

"promote the involvement of patients, and their carers and representatives (if any), in decisions which relate to—

(a) the prevention or diagnosis of illness in the patients, or

(b) their care or treatment."