Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department plans to take to reduce respiratory health inequalities.

The NHS Long Term Plan made a commitment to tackling health inequalities and earlier intervention to detect and treat respiratory disease. NHS England has set out Core20PLUS5, a national approach to reduce healthcare inequalities at both national and system level. The approach defines a target population (the ‘Core20PLUS’) and identifies ‘5’ focus clinical areas requiring accelerated improvement.

The approach will include a focus on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease driving up uptake of COVID-19, flu and pneumonia vaccines to reduce exacerbations of the disease and to reduce emergency hospital admissions due to those exacerbations, as well as smoking cessation given the strong social gradient in smoking rates that contributes to inequalities in respiratory disease and other major causes of death.