2025 UK Parkinson's Audit: findings highlight more work to be done despite Parkinson's health service improvements
Our largest ever Audit of Parkinson's health services across the UK has shown NHS services are gradually improving in quality. However, it also reveals 5 key areas of Parkinson's care that need improvement. Read on to find out more about our Audit findings, and how they could help you and your service.
Our 2025 Audit gathered data from 698 services across elderly care and neurology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and inpatient pharmacy.
It reported on the care provided to 12,620 people with Parkinson’s during the 5 month data collection period. The views of 8,863 people with Parkinson’s and their carers about their experience of the service they attend were also included.
What has this latest Audit told us?
Access to Parkinson's nurses is on the rise
Across elderly care and neurology services, 96% of patients can access a Parkinson's nurse.
Over 86% of patients thought their doctor, nurse or therapist service was excellent or good quality.
As well as this good news, services on the whole are generally improving and there are many areas of good practice evident across individual specialties. Other notable improvements across all services are:
- patient satisfaction with services (evidenced through the patient questionnaire)
- physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech and language therapy services are increasingly using evidence-based practices.
More people need information from diagnosis and medication on time in hospital
Our 2025 Audit findings have revealed there are common areas of practice across all specialties where improvement is needed.
Patients are still not being given enough information at the diagnosis stage, causing concern: only 69% got any information, and 40% said they didn't get enough. Information provided on lasting power of attorney is still worryingly low at 34%.
The newly introduced inpatient pharmacy services audit revealed that while 80% of individual doses were given on time; just 12.5% of patients got all of their medication on time during the audited period of their hospital stay which could raise serious risks.
The 2025 Audit's key themes for improvement are:
- Inpatient medicines management
- Specialised multidisciplinary working
- Communication and information sharing
- Standardised practices
- Educating the workforce.
Dr Anne-Louise Cunnington, Consultant Geriatrician and Excellence Network Clinical Audit Lead, said:
"The 2025 Parkinson’s National Audit is the largest to date, and reflects the real commitment of services across the UK to improving care for people with Parkinson’s.
"The new inpatient pharmacist component is a particularly important development. While there have been encouraging improvements from previous audit cycles, the findings also highlight where further work is needed to ensure consistently high‑quality care for everyone with Parkinson’s.”
Juliet Tizzard, Director of External Relations at Parkinson's UK, shares a similar opinion:
“The Audit gives a reassuring picture of gradual improvement and increasing patient satisfaction with services and with specialist staff.
"However, we’re concerned to see that still only a small number of people with Parkinson’s are getting their medication on time when in hospital. We need Parkinson’s services across the UK to commit to tackling this important issue, improving patient safety and reducing length of stay.”
Working together for improvement
Services who participated in the Audit each receive an Individual Service Report, benchmarking their results with others across the UK. We encourage them to review their findings and plan local service improvement projects, with our Service Improvement team supporting them across the audit improvement cycle. They'll share best practice examples and resources through our Parkinson’s UK Excellence Network meetings and webpages. Our Excellence Network regional clinical leads will review their local data and work across their regions to facilitate these improvement efforts.
We'll use these Audit findings to develop a national workstream to respond to the key themes for improvement. Projects stemming from previous Audits have focused on bone health, and induction programmes for therapy new starters.
More about our Audit
Our UK Parkinson's Audit is the only recognised UK-wide audit of Parkinson's services.
The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) lists the Audit in their Quality Accounts in the years we are collecting data. Read more about the Quality Accounts here.
It's a quality improvement process designed to ensure that care for people with Parkinson’s is consistent, safe, evidence-based and aligned with clinical guidelines.
Next steps
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access the full 2025 UK Parkinson's Audit reports
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log into the UK Parkinson's Audit tool to view your Individual Service Report and log a service improvement project (participating services)
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explore our learning and resources supporting each key improvement theme
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read our past Audit results.
Excellence Network funding
Are you looking for funds for a new clinical post or a service improvement project? We have grant opportunities to suit you.