Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department plans to take to ensure that the NHS has an adequate supply of flu vaccines in autumn 2018.
Answered by Steve Brine
Public Health England (PHE) provides flu vaccines centrally for the children’s flu programme so that eligible children are offered either the nasal spray Fluenz Tetra or an inactivated flu vaccine for those children for whom Fluenz Tetra is unsuitable. Centrally purchased flu vaccines are carefully monitored by PHE to ensure there is equitable distribution across England and sufficient in-date vaccine for patients who present throughout the season.
General practitioners and other providers are directly responsible for the flu vaccine supplies used to deliver the national flu programme to the other eligible groups.
Information on who is eligible is available at the following link:
www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/who-should-have-flu-vaccine.aspx
PHE maintains some oversight to help facilitate a constant supply of vaccine, liaising with vaccine manufacturers to ascertain whether there are any manufacturing problems which could impact the running of the programme at a national level.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of the (a) level and (b) quality of the provision of dentistry services by the NHS.
Answered by Steve Brine
NHS England has a legal duty to commission National Health Service dental services to meet the needs of the local population and to help patients who cannot find a local dentist.
Nationally, access to NHS primary care dental services remains high. In the 24 month period ending 30 June 2018, 22.1 million adults were seen by an NHS dentist and in the 12 month period ending 30 June 2018, 6.9 million children were seen by an NHS dentist.
The January to March 2017 general practitioner patient survey results were published in July 2018. These showed that 59% of adults questioned had tried to get an NHS dental appointment in the past two years and of those trying to get an appointment, 93% were successful.
Access has improved greatly over recent years but we know inequalities remain.
The Department and NHS England are continuing to test a new way of providing NHS dental services which aims to further improve oral health and increase access. NHS England’s Starting Well programme is also aiming to improve access for young children, most at risk of tooth decay, who are not currently under the care of a dentist.
In respect of the quality of NHS dental services the Care Quality Commission inspects NHS dental practices against set standards and the General Dental Council is responsible for individuals’ professional standards. In addition to this the dental contract reform programme is testing a Dental Quality and Outcomes Framework which will be used to drive standards up even further.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent meetings he has had with local authority leaders to discuss improved co-operation between the NHS and social services.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
All external meetings that Ministers have attended are published as part of the Department’s quarterly transparency returns. The returns covering 2017 and 2018 could be found in the GOV.UK website at the following link:
The return covering April to June 2018 has not yet been published but is expected to be soon.
The Ministers in the Department regularly meet with representatives of local authorities including the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services – during these meetings a range of topics are discussed, including integration of health and social care.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has emergency plans in place to assist NHS hospitals in the event of a severe influenza outbreak this year.
Answered by Steve Barclay
As part of winter resilience planning, all National Health Service trusts have plans in place to cope with capacity and demand in the event of flu emergencies. NHS winter plans for 2018-19 were published by NHS England and NHS Improvement on 7 September 2018. These include plans to drive up levels of vaccination among NHS frontline staff to help protect patients and reduce the impact of flu ahead of the winter months.
Influenza vaccination remains the best protection against flu, and should be offered to everyone over the age of 65 years, those who are at particular risk of flu, and pregnant women, at the earliest opportunity. Influenza vaccination should also be offered to all frontline healthcare workers through their occupational health teams. This year all children between 2-9 years will be offered the nasal spray vaccine to help protect them and their families against influenza.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much money his Department has spent on promoting NHS recruitment opportunities in each of the last five years.
Answered by Steve Barclay
The information requested is shown in the following table.
Financial year | Amount spent |
2014/15 | £0 |
2015/16 | £0 |
2016/17 | £0 |
2017/18 | £0 |
2018/19 | £2 million – the Department’s contribution to a national National Health Service recruitment campaign |
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what changes have been made to NHS (a) IT systems and (b) cyber security since the cyber attack in May 2017.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The National Health Service is putting in place robust measures to protect IT systems against cyber-attacks. Since May 2017 the Government has invested £60 million to support NHS providers to improve their security position, with a further £150 million pledged up until 2021 to improve the NHS’s resilience against attacks.
The Department published its progress report in February 2018 entitled ‘Securing cyber resilience in health and care: progress update’. The report is available at the following link:
Key actions taken since February 2018 include:
- signing a Windows 10 licensing agreement with Microsoft which will allow local NHS organisations to save money, reduce potential vulnerabilities and help increase cyber resilience;
- enhancing the capability of the Cyber Security Operations Centre boosting the national capability to prevent, detect and respond to cyber-attacks through the procurement of IBM as a specialist partner;
- launching the Data Security and Protection Toolkit which provides an accessible dashboard enabling trusts to track their progress in meeting the 10 Data Security Standards;
- agreeing plans to implement the recommendations of the Chief Information Officer for Health and Care’s review of the May 2017 WannaCry attack;
- provided specialist face to face security training (System Security Certified Practitioner - SSCP) for over 100 staff; and
- in May 2018 the Network and Information Security Regulations came into force which requires operators of essential services (including some NHS healthcare providers) to put appropriate security measures in place and to report significant incidents that occur.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has any targets to increase the availability of mental health care training opportunities.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The Government asked Health Education England (HEE) to work across all health bodies to develop a Mental Health Workforce plan, which was published in July 2017. ‘Stepping forward to 2020/21: The mental health workforce plan for England’ sets out concrete steps to deliver 21,000 new posts (professional and allied) across the mental health system, with the expectation that 19,000 of these places will be filled by staff employed directly by the National Health Service.
The document is available at the following link:
https://hee.nhs.uk/our-work/mental-health
Health Education England will take this plan into account as it continues to commission mental health care training for professions such as clinical psychology, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) professionals, general psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.
The expansion target for adult IAPT professionals is 4,500 between 2016 and 2021. For children and young people’s IAPT professionals, HEE will recruit and train 1,700 new professionals and train 3,400 existing NHS staff between 2016 and 2021.
Across the NHS, there will be an extra 10,000 training places for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals by 2020.