Health: RSV Immunisation

Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely correct. This applies to the take-up of a whole range of vaccinations—MMR is another example, as is polio. Inner cities, including London and cities in the West Midlands, seem to be examples where take-up is quite a few percentage points lower, not just because of ethnic minorities but more because those areas have larger migrant populations, who often have not been part of the vaccination programme. Specifically to that aim, we are now publishing information in 15 languages and are trying to reach out to some harder-to-reach groups, such as ethnic minorities, the Traveller community and Orthodox Jews. There is a programme for all this, because it is a challenge. We all know that, during Covid, we talked about an R rate of 1.5. Would you believe that, for MMR, it is 13? That is just to give noble Lords an idea. It is very, very infectious.

[Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising a very important issue. Getting the new RSV immunisation programme up and running correctly will undoubtedly save lives and, to ensure that it happens, it is really important that we learn all that we can from areas of success and failure in recent vaccine rollouts. The latest was the shingles general immunisation programme, which was introduced for all over-70s in September. Can the Minister give some indication of what data capture of rollout, uptake, demand, delivery and efficacy has been instituted and how those learnings can be applied to a future RSV programme?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

My noble friend is quite right. If we take the shingles one, we see quite a disparity. The 70 to 75 element of the programme has a 74% take- up while the 65-plus element has only a 41% take-up—so there is a huge difference. We are starting to collect the data so that we can understand those disparities and then, as I mentioned in answer to the previous question, make sure that we have an action plan to address those groups.

Clinical Negligence Claims

Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The Government have looked at a number of different schemes from abroad. It is always very important to learn from good and bad practice, but what happens in a number of those cases is that the costs of compensation end up increasing. So We are looking at various solutions.

[Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links (Con)]

My Lords, the new indemnity scheme for historical clinical negligence that was brought into effect last year, the Existing Liabilities Scheme for General Practice, initially applied only to general practice members of the Medical & Dental Defence Union of Scotland, with general practice members of the Medical Protection Society due to come under its purview a full year later, in April just past. So I ask the Minister to update the House of any formal or informal assessments of the workings of this scheme in Scotland, the level of uptake and lessons learned, before it was further rolled out.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

Before I respond, I wish to give a belated welcome to my noble friend Lady Davidson. I have worked with her often in the past, and she displays a wisdom beyond her years and a sense of humour that excels that of many on our Benches. To answer my noble friend, the Existing Liabilities Scheme for General Practice covers the historical liabilities of GPs, where the department has agreed commercial transactions with the previous indemnity providers. The scheme applies only to general practice in England and is part of the state indemnity reforms introduced in England in 2019. These 2019 reforms mean that GPs in England now benefit from more stable and affordable indemnity to cover future negligence claims. I understand that similar arrangements were introduced in Wales at the time. I am afraid that the policy on state indemnity is a devolved matter, but officials in the department are in regular contact with their counter- parts in the devolved Administrations.