Infectious Diseases: Disease Control

(asked on 6th February 2023) - View Source

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 prepare for a future pandemic.


Answered by
Maria Caulfield Portrait
Maria Caulfield
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
This question was answered on 9th February 2023

The United Kingdom has flexible and well-tested pandemic response capabilities. Learning the lessons from COVID-19, we are working with the Centre for Pandemic Preparedness in the UK Health Security Agency to ensure a flexible and capabilities-based approach to pandemic preparedness which will see emergency planners develop and maintain a generic suite of response capabilities across Government. This will enable an approach that can be flexibly deployed to meet the demands of any future pandemic and provide a whole-system response.

We cannot perfectly predict the characteristics of a new pandemic pathogen and therefore our strategic approach to pandemic preparedness constantly evolves in response to new scientific information, lessons learned from prior pandemics, responses to other infectious disease outbreaks and rigorous exercises to test our response mechanisms.

The Department is making sure that the National Health Service is prepared for future health emergencies. That is why, as announced in the 2022 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.

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