Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help ensure children's hospices have access to the personal protective equipment for providing palliative care to (a) children and (b) their families in (i) hospices and (ii) other community settings during the covid-19 outbreak.

The Department is actively taking steps to ensure that staff operating in the hospice sector, including children’s hospices, can access adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) to continue to provide palliative care to children and their families during this challenging period.

To support this, and working with key stakeholders, NHS England and NHS Improvement have developed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for palliative care for children and young people in community and hospice settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is due to published shortly, and will contain guidance on the appropriate use of PPE for the care and treatment of this vulnerable group of patients.

To address supply concerns, central delivery points provided by children’s hospices to the Department will get weekly drops of PPE until they are added on to the PPE e-commerce ordering portal. Those deliveries are booked in, and the Department will continue to work with the hospice sector to ensure they have the support they need.