Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has had discussions with NHS England on using its (a) structures and (b) delivery mechanisms to identify unpaid carers.

This summer, I met with NHS England and ministerial counterparts as part of the cross-government roundtable on unpaid carers. We discussed the identification of unpaid carers, including young carers, which continues to be an important area of work. NHS England set out how it plans to continue important work to identify, involve and support unpaid carers by, for example, enhancing the NHS App.

The Adult Social Care reform white paper, ‘People at the Heart of Care’, which was published December 2021, addressed identifying unpaid carers through increasing the use of markers in National Health Service electronic health records, by simplifying current approaches to data collection and registration.

On 17 October 2022, NHS England wrote to all general practitioner practices about the importance of identifying carers and advising how caring status should be recorded on patient records.