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 resilience and pandemic preparedness of the acute intensive care system.

Pandemic preparedness is an area the Department keeps under constant review. Our strategic approach to pandemic preparedness evolves in response to new scientific information, lessons learned from prior pandemics, responses to other infectious disease outbreaks and rigorous exercising to test our response mechanisms.

In planning for a broader range of pandemic scenarios, we are taking a flexible capabilities-based approach to pandemic preparedness. We are ensuring that we have the right capabilities in place to provide a whole-system response to future pandemics that mitigates the pressures an extreme surge in demand can put on National Health Service intensive care capacity.

The Department is making sure that the NHS intensive care system is prepared for future health emergencies. That’s why, as announced in the Autumn Statement, the Government is investing an additional £3.3 billion in each of the next two years to enable rapid action to improve urgent and emergency, elective, and primary care performance to pre-pandemic levels.