Asked by: Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government, with reference to research by Christine Camacho and Luke Munford at the University of Manchester, what steps they are taking to reduce regional inequalities in what those researchers refer to as "Deaths of Despair".
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Levelling Up the United Kingdom white paper sets out the Government’s ambition to improve living standards and wellbeing across the UK, invest in communities, and improve public services. It sets mutually reinforcing levelling up missions to focus Government action, including a health mission to narrow the gap in healthy life expectancy by 2030, and increase healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035.
The Government has published a 10-year drug strategy and is investing an extra £532 million between 2022/23 to 2024/25 to improve drug and alcohol treatment and recovery services. This funding is being used by local authorities to create places for an additional 54,500 people in drug and alcohol treatment services and bolster the workforce, seeking to prevent nearly 1,000 deaths. This funding is being targeted to areas of highest need first.
The Department is increasingly focusing on supporting local areas, including better meeting the needs of vulnerable groups. Current work includes: providing targeted support to local areas; enhancing data tools to better inform local needs assessments; supporting workforce development; implementation of the commissioning quality standard; and sharing good practice. Implementation support will adapt over the course of the 10-year strategy in response to need, to ensure we reach the drug strategy goals.
We also published our new Suicide Prevention Strategy for England in September 2023, setting out the actions we will take to save lives and reduce suicides within the next few years, and have set out our intention in the strategy to write guidance for local areas to support them in aligning their own strategies with the national strategy. We have also established a £10 million Suicide Prevention Grant Fund to run from 2023 to March 2025, and on 4 March 2024 we announced the 79 organisations across the country that have been allocated funding. We have also launched a new nationwide, near real-time suspected suicide surveillance system, that will improve the early detection of, and timely action to, address changes in suicide rates or trends.
Asked by: Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to tackle diet-related ill-health, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
We remain committed to promoting a healthy diet for adults and children and are delivering an ambitious programme of work to create a healthier environment to help people make healthy food choices to improve health and to tackle diet related ill health. There are a range of measures in place to support improving diets, promoting physical activity and reducing obesity.
Regulations on out of home calorie labelling for food sold in large businesses, including restaurants, cafes and takeaways, came into force in April 2022. Restrictions on the placement of products high in fat, sugar or salt in key selling locations, came into force on 1 October 2022. We will be implementing restrictions on the sale of less healthy products by volume price such as ‘3 for 2’ and will introduce restrictions on the advertising of less healthy products before 9pm on TV and paid for less healthy product advertising online from 1 October 2025.
We are working with the food industry to make further progress on reformulation and ensure it is easier for the public to make healthier choices. The Food Data Transparency Partnership will help enable and encourage food companies to voluntarily demonstrate progress on the healthiness of their sales.
The Government continues to promote the Eatwell Guide principles through the NHS.UK website and government social marketing campaigns such as Better Health Healthier Families and Start for Life. We are also supporting more than three million children through the Healthy Foods Schemes and helping schools boost physical activity to help children maintain a healthy weight and good overall health through the Primary School PE and Sport Premium and the School Games Organiser Network.
We are continuing to support local authorities to improve the uptake of the NHS Health Check, England's cardiovascular disease prevention programme. The NHS Health Check helps to prevent a range of conditions including heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Each year the programme engages over 1 million people and prevents around 400 heart attacks or strokes.
Asked by: Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government, following the Food Data Transparency Partnership’s decision not to make reporting on health data mandatory, what steps they are taking to ensure enforcement of and consistency in the voluntary scheme.
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Food Data Transparency Partnership’s (FDTP) Health Working Group (HWG) has been testing the effectiveness and quality of potential standardised metrics that food and drink companies can use to report on the healthiness of their sales. This is an important part of government’s strategy to address poor diet and reduce obesity and was restated in the Major Conditions Strategy interim report August 2023.
Once a recommended set of metrics and reporting guidance has been produced and approved by Ministers, the expectation is that businesses who voluntarily report will all follow this standardised approach.
A key commitment of the HWG is timely and transparent communication so that wider food sector stakeholders can input into each stage of the process in order to ensure recommendations around comparability and enforcement will be as viable and effective as possible. Alongside engagement with industry, the FDTP also regularly engages civil society organisations and investor groups to gather and integrate wider feedback into discussions. Summaries of these HWG discussions are published online on the FDTP GOV.UK page.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made on integrating social care and the NHS.
Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Health and Care Act 2022 established integrated care systems, reforming how health and adult social care work together by putting partnership at the heart of planning. The Government has published guidance for integrated care partnerships (ICPs), on the statutory requirement for each ICP to publish an Integrated Care Strategy to address the health, social care, and public health needs of their system. All ICPs have now published their integrated care strategies.
The integration of health and social care is often best achieved through collaboration across smaller geographies within integrated care systems called places. Since the Health and Care Act 2022, we have seen good progress in the development of place-based arrangements to integrate health and social care. In October 2023, we published our Shared Outcomes Toolkit designed to help place-based partnerships develop shared outcomes as a powerful means of promoting integrated working and joined up care. We also issued a call for evidence as part of our review of Section 75 of the NHS Act 2006, which permits local authorities and National Health Service bodies to pool budgets, enabling joint commissioning and the commissioning of integrated services. The findings of this review will be shared in due course.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to help increase the number of people participating in smoking cessation programmes.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Smoking is the number one entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability and death in this country. It is responsible for 80,000 yearly deaths in the United Kingdom and one in four of all UK cancer deaths. It costs our country £17 billion a year, £14 billion of which is through lost productivity alone. It puts a huge pressure on the National Health Service and social care, costing over £3 billion a year. Quitting smoking is the best thing a smoker can do for their health and smokers are three times as likely to succeed with stop smoking services (SSS) when compared to an unsupported quit attempt.
As announced in Stopping the start: our new plan to create a smokefree generation, published in October 2023, the Government is investing an additional £70 million per year for five years to support local authority-led SSS, around doubling current spend and supporting 360,000 people to set a quit date each year. To support engagement with SSS, and increase motivation to quit, we are spending an additional £15 million per year to fund national anti-smoking campaigns. We are also investing up to £45 million over two years to roll out our national ‘Swap to Stop’ scheme and establishing a financial incentives scheme to help pregnant smokers and their partners quit smoking with smoking cessation support.
Vaping is never recommended for children, and carries the potential harms of future addiction while their lungs and brains are still developing. The health advice is clear, vapes can be an effective tool to help smokers quit, but young people and those who have never smoked should not vape, or be encouraged to vape.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of vaping on the health of pregnant women; and whether she plans to take steps to encourage pregnant women to stop vaping.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Our health advice on vaping is clear, if you smoke, it is better to vape, but if you don’t smoke, you should never vape. Evidence to date suggests vaping is less harmful than smoking. Research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research finds that pregnant women who vaped, when compared to women who used Nicotine Replacement Therapy, were twice as likely to quit, and that both approaches were safer than smoking. Further information is available at the following link:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01808-0
To help pregnant smokers quit smoking, the Government is providing up to £10 million of investment over 2023/24 and 2024/25 via a financial incentives scheme. This evidence-based intervention, supported by behavioural support, will encourage pregnant women to quit smoking, and remain smokefree throughout pregnancy and beyond, helping to improve the health and wellbeing of both mother and baby.
Asked by: Navendu Mishra (Labour - Stockport)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to provide mental health support for the dental workforce.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan commits the National Health Service to supporting staff health and wellbeing, and asks integrated care systems to develop plans to support NHS staff in maintaining their mental health.
The NHS dental workforce is also able to access the NHS Practitioner Health Service. NHS England is in the process of reviewing the service as part of a wider review into its mental health and wellbeing offer to all staff, including the dental workforce.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of (a) stigma and (b) gender norms on trends in the number of men accessing mental health services.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
NHS England’s Advancing Mental Health Equalities Strategy launched in September 2020, to assess inequalities in access, including those based on gender, and to set out guidance on how services should be taking this into account.
Fundamentally, this strategy aims to ensure that access to the timely, high-quality mental healthcare as described in the NHS Long Term Plan is equitable, by equipping systems with the tools and enablers they need to bridge the gaps between people, such as men, faring worse than others in mental health services.
Middle-aged men are identified in Suicide prevention in England: 5-year cross-sector strategy, as a priority group for action. The strategy acknowledges that stigma can be a barrier to people seeking support, and it encourages local government, the National Health Service, and voluntary sector organisations to work together to encourage the reduction of this stigma.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to support unpaid carers in rural areas.
Answered by Helen Whately - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Care Act (2014) requires local authorities to deliver a wide range of sustainable, high-quality care and support services, including support for unpaid carers. Local authorities are required to undertake a Carer’s Assessment for any unpaid carer who appears to have a need for support, and to meet their eligible needs on request from the carer.
Through the Accelerating Reform Fund (ARF), we are investing £42.6 million for innovative local projects focused on transforming the care sector. The purpose of the ARF is to support two or more projects in each area, with at least one of those having a particular focus on unpaid carers. More than half of the projects, and at least one in each integrated care system area, are focused on identifying, recognising, and supporting unpaid carers.
Asked by: Preet Kaur Gill (Labour (Co-op) - Birmingham, Edgbaston)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many NHS Inpatient Detox units there are by location.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
There are eight NHS inpatient detoxification units in England. They are listed below:
Guys and St Thomas NHS Trust (London),
Bridge House, Kent and Medway NHS Trust (Maidstone, Kent),
Dame Carol Black Unit, Midlands Foundation NHS Trust (Fareham, Hampshire),
Acer Unit, Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (Bristol),
Edward Myers Unit, Staffordshire Combined NHS Trust (Stoke),
New Beginnings, Rotherham, Doncaster, South Humber Foundation NHS Trust (Doncaster), Chapman Barker Unit, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Trust (Manchester),
Topaz Ward, Essex Partnership NHS Trust (Chelmsford, Essex).