Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the covid-19 outbreak, what assessment he has made of the availability of personal protective equipment for (a) workers who deliver primary care services and (b) GPs; and what additional resources have been allocated to the provision of that equipment.
The Government is working around the clock to give the National Health Service and social care sectors the PPE equipment and support they need to tackle this outbreak. We are working to expand supply from overseas and improve domestic manufacturing capability. The NHS, industry and the Armed Forces have created a PPE distribution network almost from scratch, providing drops of critical equipment to 58,000 healthcare settings including GPs and pharmacies. The Government is working with e-commerce expertise to pilot a new online portal to help primary and social care providers to order critical PPE.
Over 1.6billion items of PPE have been distributed across the health and social care system.