Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made for the implication of his policies of the announcement of 310 redundancies from Macmillan cancer support on the (a) health, (b) wellbeing and (c) financial security for cancer patients; and will he make a statement.
Answered by Jo Churchill
The National Health Service is grateful for Macmillan Cancer Support’s help to support and reassure patients during this unprecedented time and we continue to work closely with the charity at a national level.
Macmillan Cancer Support has representation on the new Cancer Recovery Taskforce along with the National Cancer Board, and the Chief Executive of Macmillan chairs the NHS England and NHS Improvement Cancer Charity Forum. The new Cancer Recovery Taskforce brings together members of the cancer community to coordinate and share expertise and ultimately enable progress towards the successful recovery of cancer services during 2020/21.
Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what live PFI contracts his Department has; and for each of those contracts (a) what service is provided, (b) when the contract became live, (c) what the remaining term of the contract is and (d) what the annual repayments are.
Answered by Edward Argar
HM Treasury and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) publish a joint dataset listing all active Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects, including those held by the National Health Service. This data includes the dates when each PFI contract was signed and began operations, the length of the contract, and annual Unitary Charge payments.
Each NHS PFI contract includes building maintenance services as a minimum. Other services provided as part of the PFI contract vary depending on the requirements and circumstances of each NHS trust or foundation trust and are subject to change over time. NHS PFI contracts are held directly by individuals NHS trusts and foundation trusts, not the Department.
The latest HM Treasury/IPA data on PFI contracts was published in May 2019 and is available on the GOV.UK website at the following link:
Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what reasons regulation of the health professions is devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly but not to the Scottish Parliament.
Answered by Helen Whately - Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
The devolved nations, institutions and their respective devolution settlements are all different and are considered as individual organisations. The devolution settlements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland enable different powers to each of the respective devolved legislatures and to the Ministers of the devolved administrations.
Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to prevent a second covid-19 wave.
Answered by Edward Argar
To prepare the National Health Service for winter, the Government is providing an additional £3 billion of funding. This includes funding to allow the NHS to maintain the Nightingale surge capacity and continue to use the extra hospital capacity available within the independent sector.
Effective local management of any outbreaks is the first line of protection against a second wave that might overwhelm the NHS. To support local authorities, we made £300 million available and they already have robust plans in place to respond to outbreaks.
We have also made significant strides in our Test and Trace service. We have established one of the world’s largest testing programmes, with capacity at around 350,000 tests every day and we have already traced around 250,000 people who may have unknowingly spread the virus.
NHS winter preparations include delivering a very significantly expanded seasonal flu vaccination programme for priority groups.