Letter from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to Dr Camilla Kingdon

Dear Dr Kingdon,

I wish to thanks for chairing the impartial evaluation of kids’s listening to companies and for the report that you’ve got ready. The report shines a light-weight on important failures in youngsters’s listening to companies and within the programme got down to enhance these companies. This failure is unacceptable. The influence of missed and incorrect prognosis for these infants and youngsters will be lifelong.

As a precedence, I’ve requested NHS England to work to deal with points with the Paediatric Hearing Services Improvement Programme. It is significant we work at tempo to minimise the potential hurt to infants and youngsters from these service failures.

NHS England is already taking motion in lots of the areas you have got recognized, together with contemplating methods we are able to enhance oversight of the audiology occupation particularly to make sure coaching routes {and professional} growth are as much as scratch, whereas additionally ensuring that governance is constant throughout the well being system. NHS England is actively working with the National Deaf Children’s Society to provide improved communications to assist households with deaf youngsters and to evaluation coaching programmes accomplished by audiologists.

In the final 12 months, opinions of diagnostic traces have elevated from 32% to 54% and recollects from 41% to 65%. NHS England has made important progress and there was sustained exercise to determine companies in want of enchancment within the 140 paediatric audiology companies throughout the nation.

The authorities has additionally: 

• confirmed over £6 billion extra capital funding over 5 years for diagnostic, elective and pressing care capability – which may very well be used to fund tools and services for paediatric audiology companies
• confirmed funding for expanded testing capability via neighborhood diagnostic centres with ‘straight to test’ pathways – these are a one cease service the place paediatric sufferers can obtain listening to checks, enabling prognosis in a single go to

But there’s way more to do. In the long run, I’m dedicated to creating positive we’ve the appropriate NHS workers in the appropriate locations with the appropriate abilities via our forthcoming 10 Year Workforce Plan and bringing NHS England into the division to finish the communication failures that allowed this scandal to develop. Our elective reform plan commits to reworking and increasing diagnostic companies throughout the board to hurry up ready instances for checks and thru our 10 Year Health Plan, we’re shifting extra care to the neighborhood by way of companies like neighborhood diagnostic centres which host audiology testing. After over a decade of being starved of capital funding, our file funding into the NHS is ensuring it has the cutting-edge services and tools wanted to deliver it into the twenty first century. But I do know there’s way more we nonetheless have to do.

We will publish a full and thought of response to the entire suggestions made by the evaluation as quickly as attainable.

I wish to guarantee you that we absolutely perceive the significance of getting it proper for youngsters’s listening to companies and for different essential companies that don’t obtain the eye they deserve. I’m decided to ensure this by no means occurs once more.

The Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care