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 adequacy of public education on the the benefits of PrEP.

In 2018, to assess the adequacy of public education on the benefits of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in collaboration with PrEPster, Public Health England (PHE) conducted a mapping exercise to assess what other health promotion work is being conducted by community organisations and the National Health Service around PrEP. The results of this mapping exercise and more on PrEPster at is available at the following links:

https://www.bhiva.org/file/5b7fabf6b4b25/PrEP-and-Health-Promotion-activity.pdf

https://prepster.info

Additionally, the national HIV prevention programme is helping address awareness of PrEP through promoting a combination prevention approach to raise awareness and promote actions to take on the various ways to prevent HIV. PHE also runs the HIV Prevention Innovation Fund which supports volunteer organisations spearheading new approaches to HIV prevention and focuses on engaging at-risk or under-served communities. Since 2017 the Innovation Fund has funded seven projects centred around raising knowledge and awareness of PrEP, particularly in underserved populations such as women and black African communities. Projects report that levels of knowledge about PrEP in these groups is lower than among gay and bisexual men. The 2018 projects are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/innovative-hiv-prevention-projects-reached-170000-people-in-2018