Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what guidance his Department has issued on the (a) use and (b) retention of information produced from Guthrie tests.

The Guthrie test was used for detecting phenylketonuria. However, as the newborn bloodspot screening programme screens for nine rare conditions, the heel prick test is performed using the newer technique of tandem mass spectrometry to detect conditions.

Public Health England (PHE) and NHS England have published the ‘NHS Newborn Blood Spot Screening Programme Code of Practice for the retention and storage of residual newborn blood spots’. This code of practice was published in January 2018 and applies to all newborn blood spot samples. It sets out arrangements for the retention, storage, use and release of residual newborn blood spots and related information and communication requirements.

The retention guidance is currently under review and will be updated shortly.