Sutton Borough Liberal Democrats

Information on the number of full-time equivalent multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's specialist nurses is not collected centrally.

It is the responsibility of primary care trusts to ensure they have sufficient staff available to meet the needs of their local population.

This information is not held centrally. The provision of interpretation and translation services by NHS bodies is a matter for local determination.

A number of independent audits, investigations and inspections have revealed long standing and unacceptable variations in the standard of care older people receive in the national health service and social care. The Government are determined to root out poor quality care wherever it is found. We have established the National Nursing and Care Quality Forum to work with patients, carers and professionals to spread best practice.

Access has already grown by over three quarters of a million since May 2010, with 991,000 more patients able to see a national health service dentist. We announced last week an extra £28 million in year funding to increase this still further.

I can indeed. We will shortly be publishing a more detailed implementation plan showing the role that the NHS Commissioning Board, the clinical commissioning groups and others will play, alongside the voluntary sector, in delivering the strategy. More importantly, we are also doing work on long-term conditions that will begin, for the first time, to join up the way in which we commission physical and mental health services. We have to do that in order to deliver better outcomes for people.

I am grateful for my hon. Friend's question, and I know that a lot of work is being done across the county of Norfolk between the NHS and social care. Nationally, the Government are working with the Royal College of General Practitioners, Carers UK, the Princess Royal Trust for Carers and Crossroads Care to recruit GP carers champions and volunteer carers ambassadors, and make them aware of the need not just to identify carers, but to ensure that they take the necessary action to assess and provide appropriate support, so that carers get a break from their caring responsibilities and have the opportunity both to stay in work, if that is what they want to do, and to have a life, not just a caring responsibility.

The hon. Gentleman raises an important issue that we are discussing with the GDC. The council's work on revalidation will ensure that the work of those supervising foreign dentists and, where appropriate, foreign dentists themselves is properly covered.

My hon. Friend is right about the need to invest in early intervention and prevention. In addition to the £7.2 billion that we will invest this Parliament, this January we announced an extra £120 million for the remainder of the year to support care services. Furthermore, we are funding, jointly with the Local Government Association, work to support councils in delivering improved productivity and sharing best practice to ensure that they deliver improvements to services, and not just cuts.

I have not had such conversations with the university to which the hon. Gentleman refers. However, this Government, right from their first Budget, have indicated their commitment to prioritising research into dementia-both the basic research that gives us the targets for detailed research and the translational research. We have put in place all the building blocks that will allow this country not only to maintain its pre-eminence but to accelerate the pace of research.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Training is certainly one of the issues highlighted by the audit. We are taking a number of steps. We are working with the Royal College of Nursing, which has developed an online dementia information resource; we have been working with Skills for Care and Skills for Health to provide a series of training workshops for staff; we have been working with Oxford Deanery to trial a new approach to dementia education and training for GPs; and we are funding another audit to make sure that we keep track of the improvements that we expect to see across the NHS.

As many as four out of 10 people in hospital have dementia, and people with dementia stay longer in hospital. We know that there is much room for improvement. That is why we have set a new national goal for hospitals actively to identify people with dementia.

It was a somewhat longer question than that, so I hope the hon. Lady will let me go a little further than a yes or no. I tell her that at the end of December 2011 only 1.4% of patients were waiting six

weeks or longer for one of the 15 key diagnostic tests, and that just five NHS trusts are responsible for about 30% of all waits of six weeks or longer. We are working specifically with those five trusts to bear down on those waits and ensure that people do not have to wait so long. Of course she is right to make her point about waits, which is why the Government are focused on the issue and have sent in the additional support needed to ensure that trusts deal with it.

My hon. Friend, who chairs the all-party group on cancer, has been pursuing that issue vigorously. We certainly need to ensure that we use both proxy and other performance indicators on cancer outcomes, and I will want to continue examining whether that indicator is the most appropriate one to tell us what we need to know about improvements in cancer outcomes performance.

I say two things to the hon. Gentleman: first, that the reforms will actually release resources from back-office costs and put them back into the front line, which I hope all hon. Members want to happen; and, secondly, that when it comes to our cancer strategy, we committed additional resources in the spending review to invest in cancer services. If he wants to raise specific issues with me, I will be only too happy to address them.

Through the national cancer equality initiative, we are working in partnership with patients, professionals, academics and the voluntary sector to take forward a range of projects, such as working with Macmillan Cancer Support and Age UK to tackle the under-treatment of older people, our launching of the "Cancer does not discriminate" campaign with black and minority ethnic groups and our funding of work to target lesbian and bisexual women with cervical screening.

That was a pretty limp attempt. One of the most striking things about this Question Time is how many Opposition Members are yet again suffering from another health problem-memory lapses. When it comes to the Labour party's record in government, £12 billion was wasted on a computer system that did not work, with which 60,000 nurses could have been recruited and employed for a decade.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who I know campaigns on these issues and has a parliamentary reception on them later this week. She is absolutely right that we need to ensure that there are improvements in the area, and that is why I can confirm today that discussions are under way with clinical leaders on the

potential development of a tariff to cover allergy services and the steps necessary to make that possible. On training places, I can confirm also that the joint working group, on which the Department, strategic health authorities, NHS Employers, postgraduate medical deans and professional organisations sit, does look at those issues and make recommendations about additional places.

A number of reports have highlighted variations in NHS allergy services and a lack of integration throughout primary, secondary and tertiary care. The Department has funded the NHS in north-west England to pilot an integrated model of care, and the results of that work have been widely disseminated. The Government expect NHS commissioners to commission services to meet the health needs of their local population and to deliver improving outcomes for patients.

We are currently considering the responses we received to the consultation on a new suicide prevention strategy and intend to publish later this year.

The Health and Social Care Bill sets out the proposed statutory framework for the regulation of social workers in England by the Health Professions Council.

No formal guidelines have been given to the Health Professions Council by the Secretary of State for Health on the registration of social workers. The Health Professions Council is an independent statutory body and it will be for the council itself to determine the approach to regulating social workers in England according to the statutory requirements.

The Health Professions Council has established a professional liaison group, which includes representatives of social workers, employers, education providers and service users to consider the standards of proficiency and the threshold level of qualifications for social workers in England.