Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many ventilators have been purchased by the NHS since the start of the covid-10 outbreak.

At the start of the Covid-19 outbreak in March there were more than 8,000 ventilators in hospitals across the UK. Today, we have over 10,800 mechanical ventilators available to NHS patients. There are another 2,000 mechanical ventilators on order that are expected to be available shortly, comprising 1,500 sourced from existing providers and 500 from new UK suppliers responding to the Prime Minister’s ventilator challenge.

This figure will continue to rise as we procure further equipment and more products from the PM’s ventilator challenge become available.