Asked by: Mike Hancock (Independent - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the positive and negative effects of e-cigarettes on people with asthma.
Answered by Jane Ellison
No such assessment has been made.
Asked by: Mike Hancock (Independent - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of research on the efficacy and safety of e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid.
Answered by Jane Ellison
According to the ASH Smokefree GB survey, around two million adults in Great Britain currently use e-cigarettes. A third are ex-smokers who have given up completely, and a further third are using them as part of a quit attempt.
While e-cigarettes are not completely without risk, they carry a far lower risk to health than smoking tobacco. A recent Cochrane Review found that e-cigarettes can help smokers to quit or reduce their smoking and the National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) advice to local stop smoking services is that they should be open to helping smokers who want to quit smoking with the help of e-cigarettes, especially in those that have tried, but not succeeded, in stopping smoking with the use of licenced stop smoking medicines.
Public Health England (PHE) is responsible for reviewing the evidence on e-cigarettes and providing evidence-based recommendations to inform the Government’s future thinking. In May 2014 PHE published an expert report from Professor John Britton, one of the UK’s leading respiratory physicians and tobacco researchers (available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/311887/Ecigarettes_report.pdf).
Asked by: Mike Hancock (Independent - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will assess the potential merits of signing a covenant with Portsmouth City Council to prevent the land at the St James' Hospital site being developed.
Answered by Dan Poulter
This is a matter for NHS Property Services (NHS PS).
NHS PS has advised that there is no operational rationale for a covenant to restrict the future use and development of surplus land and buildings at the site.
We understand there are local proposals, under the St Mary’s and St James’ Estate Project in Portsmouth, aiming:
- to make St Mary’s Community Health Campus the focus of community care services in Portsmouth;
- to retain mental health facilities at St James’ Hospital;
- to reduce substantial areas of unused space at both sites;
- to dispose of surplus land and buildings at St James’ and invest in St Mary’s and other NHS facilities in the city, and
- to generate savings of circa £3 million in the ongoing cost of running the NHS-owned and occupied estate.
As part of the rationalisation plans, we are advised surplus land and buildings at St James’ Hospital will be released for redevelopment and this will take place over two phases.
Asked by: Mike Hancock (Independent - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many prisoners in England and Wales have received prescription drugs for psychiatric illness in the last three years.
Answered by Norman Lamb
This information is not collected centrally.
Asked by: Mike Hancock (Independent - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent assessment he has made of the level of support available for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Answered by Norman Lamb
No recent central assessment has been made of the level of support available for people with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Such assessments are conducted at a local level as part of any local area's Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA). JSNAs are the means by which local leaders work together to understand and agree the needs of all local people, with the joint health and wellbeing strategy setting the priorities for collective action. Clinical commissioning groups are then responsible for commissioning services to meet the assessed needs of the local population they serve.
Asked by: Mike Hancock (Independent - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the number of deaths in (a) Portsmouth, (b) Hampshire and (c) the South East attributed to air pollution in each of the last 10 years.
Answered by Jane Ellison
Estimates of the fraction of mortality in English local authority areas and regions in 2010 and 2011 attributable to long-term exposure to particulate air pollution arising from human activities are published by Public Health England (PHE) as one of the indicators in the Department of Health's Public Health Outcomes Framework. For Portsmouth Unitary Authority this figure was 5.9% in both 2010 and 2011; for Hampshire County Council this figure was 5.3% in 2010 and 5.4% in 2011; and for the South East this figure was 5.5% in both 2010 and 2011.
PHE has also published mortality estimates for 2010 as attributable deaths[1] and associated years of life lost. The estimated mortality burdens attributable to long-term exposure to particulate air pollution arising from human activities were: 95 attributable deaths and 1059 associated years of life lost in Portsmouth Unitary Authority; 601 attributable deaths and 6211 associated years of life lost in Hampshire County Council; and 4,034 attributable deaths and 41,729 associated years of life lost in the South East.
[1] The ‘number of deaths' attributable to a risk factor is a metric which is widely used in communicating about public health risks. Nonetheless, a calculated figure of ‘attributable deaths' does not represent the number of individuals whose length of life has been shortened by air pollution. Long-term exposure to air pollution is understood to be a contributory factor to deaths from respiratory and, particularly, cardiovascular disease, ie unlikely to be the sole cause of deaths of individuals. This means that it is likely that air pollution contributes a smaller amount to the deaths of a larger number of exposed individuals rather than being solely responsible for a number of deaths equivalent to the calculated figure of ‘attributable deaths'. The distribution of the mortality effect within the population is unknown.