Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps have been taken to ensure that specialists regularly update the Shielded Patient List in respect of clinically extremely vulnerable people during the covid-19 outbreak for people with inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammatory bowel disease is not a condition that automatically identifies someone as clinically extremely vulnerable. However, there may be individuals with inflammatory bowel disease who are classed as clinically extremely vulnerable because of other clinical conditions, or as a result of the findings of the QCOVID predictive risk model.

Guidance on how clinicians can update the Shielded Patient List is regularly issued to the National Health Service and is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/coronavirus/shielded-patient-list