Asked by: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress he has made on the rollout of vaccinations for people aged over 80.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The National Health Service met its target of offering the COVID-19 vaccine to everyone in the top four priority cohorts, including those aged 70 years and over, on 14 February 2021.
Asked by: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people aged 70 years and over have received covid-19 vaccinations in the Caithness, Sutherland, and Easter Ross constituency.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The information is not held in the format requested as data for Scotland is published by local authority rather than constituency. Public Health Scotland’s data for the vaccine programme is available at the following link:
Asked by: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)
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 improve access to affordable (a) meditation, (b) mindfulness classes, (c) yoga, (d) pilates and (e) hitt workouts to improve people's mental health.
Answered by Nadine Dorries
The Government is absolutely committed to supporting everyone’s mental health and wellbeing throughout the winter period and beyond, and to ensuring that the right support is in place. The National Health Service has launched a major campaign as part of its ‘Help Us Help You’ campaign to encourage people who may be struggling with common mental health illnesses to come forward for help.
The NHS is also taking a holistic approach to supporting people’s health and wellbeing by expanding its social prescribing services. Social prescribing enables general practitioners to refer people to link workers who can work with them to access community groups and agencies for practical, emotional and social support. For example, the recently announced ukactive scheme will make free gym and leisure sessions available to the public via social prescribing services. National rollout will start from 1 April 2021.
Asked by: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to promote mental health services and counselling in increase the take-up of such services.
Answered by Nadine Dorries
We continue to expand access to talking and psychological therapies through the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. IAPT services are promoted through Every Mind Matters, an online platform which contains resources to help people look after their wellbeing and mental health and local services can be located through NHS.UK.
Data from 2019/20 shows that there were 1.69 million referrals to talking therapies in England and 1.17 million people started a course of treatment within this year. The NHS Long Term Plan commits to ensuring that a total of 1.9 million adults will be able to access IAPT services by 2023/24.
Asked by: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to make specialised counselling and therapy services freely available on the NHS.
Answered by Nadine Dorries
The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme provides specialist counselling and therapy services that are widely available for free from the National Health Service. We are committed to expanding access to IAPT services. The NHS Long Term Plan commits to ensuring that an additional 380,000 adults will be able to access IAPT services by 2023/24.