Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has made a recent assessment of the impact of covid-19 infection rates among health and social care staff on the delivery of frontline health and social care services.

Sickness absence rates, including COVID-19 absence, among National Health Service staff are currently collected and published by NHS England. Data is published monthly in their COVID-19 data release and also weekly, for a subset of providers within the Urgent and Emergency Care Situation Reports for 2023/24. The monthly and weekly data sets, respectively, are available at the following links:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospital-activity/

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/uec-sitrep/urgent-and-emergency-care-daily-situation-reports-2023-24/

Similarly for adult social care settings, data on staff absences due to COVID-19 related reasons are collected by the Department and published monthly, and are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/monthly-statistics-for-adult-social-care-england

However, whilst rates are collected and monitored both centrally and locally, there has been no specific recent assessment of the impact of COVID-19 infection rates among health and social care staff on the delivery of frontline health and social care services.