Health Services: Rural Areas
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to provide mobile health services to support rural agricultural communities where (a) committing and (b) travelling to appointments at set times can be a challenge.
Answered by Karin Smyth
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning healthcare services that meet the needs of their local populations. When ICBs exercise their functions, they have a duty to reduce inequalities between persons with respect to their ability to access health services, and to reduce inequalities between patients with respect to the outcomes achieved for them by the provision of health services.
The Department recognises that providing services in rural areas comes with significant additional costs, for example, in travel and staff time. That is why the funding formula used by NHS England to allocate funds to ICBs includes an element to better reflect the needs in some rural, coastal, and remote areas.
The Department also wants ICBs to ensure that travel is not a prohibitive factor. There is a longstanding policy in the National Health Service that if you are eligible, you may be able to claim a refund for reasonable travel costs to receive services that are not primary medical, dental, or ophthalmic, following a referral by a healthcare professional. That scheme, the Healthcare Travel Costs Scheme, continues to apply.
Furthermore, NHS England strives for digital services to improve healthcare access. NHS England published the Inclusive digital healthcare: a framework for NHS action on digital inclusion in September 2023, which is available at the following link:
This framework highlights that certain groups, including people living in areas with inadequate broadband and mobile data coverage, especially rural and coastal areas, face higher risks of both digital exclusion and health inequalities. The framework is designed to ensure NHS services are accessible to people who are digitally excluded.
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