Disability Aids
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that disabled people receive essential medical and mobility equipment, such as wheelchairs and hoists, in a timely manner.
Answered by Dr Zubir Ahmed
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning services to meet the health needs of their local population, and responsibility for providing equipment and wheelchairs to disabled people typically falls to local authorities and the National Health Service.
Local authorities in England have a statutory duty to make arrangements for the provision of community equipment for disabled people in their area. Responsibility for managing the market for these services, including commissioning and oversight of delivery, rests with local authorities. The NHS is responsible for providing wheelchairs for people with longer-term, complex needs.
The Medium Term Planning Framework, published in October 2025, requires that from 2026/27 all ICBs and community health services must actively manage and reduce the proportion of waits across all community health services over 18 weeks and develop a plan to eliminate all 52-week waits. These targets will guide systems to reduce longest waits.
NHS England is supporting ICBs to reduce delays and regional variation in the quality and provision of NHS wheelchairs. Since July 2015, NHS England has collected quarterly data from clinical commissioning groups, now ICBs, on wheelchair provision, including waiting times, to enable targeted action if improvement is required.
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