Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department plans to take to help ensure that there are sufficient supplies of blood for use in transfusions and operations.

The Department is working with NHS Blood and Transplant and NHS England to understand the causes of the blood stock shortages and the mitigations being implemented to rebuild stock levels.

NHS Blood and Transplant is deploying measures to increase capacity to collect more blood, ensure blood remains available for emergencies and urgent surgeries in the immediate terms and increase future resilience to similar or new challenges, including staff absences. These include fast-track training for new staff, use of agency staff to support frontline donation centres in the short term and plasma collection capacity has been converted to use for blood collections. NHS Blood and Transplant is encouraging existing O negative and O positive donors to book an appointment to donate.