Asked by: Laura Farris (Conservative - Newbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of (a) allowing self-isolating individuals to visit family members in care homes who are suffering from isolation and (b) facilitating care home residents to visit covid-secure family homes.
Answered by Helen Whately - Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
We recognise how important it is to allow care home residents to meet their loved ones safely, and appreciate the particular challenges visiting restrictions pose for people with dementia, learning disabilities and autistic adults, amongst others and their loved ones.
In the face of a new variant of the virus we have acted to protect those most at risk in care homes and ensure visits can go ahead safely in some form. As set out in national lockdown guidance, visits to care homes can continue to take place with arrangements such as outdoor visiting, substantial screens, visiting pods, or behind windows. Close-contact indoor visits are not currently allowed. Visits in exceptional circumstances including end of life should always be supported and enabled.
We have also published guidance on visits out of care homes such as to the family home during this period of this national lockdown. People, including care home residents, must stay at home and must not gather indoors unless one of the specified exemptions apply. This means that a resident will not in general be able to meet another household indoors, for example, visiting their family in the family’s home.
We are keeping all our guidance under regular review, and will seek to provide further opportunities for families to visit and spend time together as it becomes safer to do so.
Asked by: Laura Farris (Conservative - Newbury)
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 reduce waiting times for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in West Berkshire.
Answered by Nadine Dorries
Expanding access to children’s mental health services nationally is a priority for this Government, and it is a core part of the NHS Long Term Plan. The National Health Service has set an ambitious goal of an extra 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 receiving support via NHS-funded mental health services and schools-based mental health support teams (MHSTs) by 2023/24.
MHSTs are a proposal of our Green Paper on improving children and young people’s mental health provision. We are trialling the proposals in trailblazer areas. The first 25 areas, announced in December 2018, are running the first wave of 59 MHSTs. West Berkshire is one of those 25 areas.
Twelve of the first trailblazer areas have also been chosen to pilot a four-week waiting time.
West Berkshire, Reading and Wokingham co-operate at local leadership level to support a shared children’s mental health Local Transformation Plan, which promotes resilience, and good mental health and wellbeing. It can be found at the following link:
www.berkshirewestccg.nhs.uk/about-us/how-we-work-with-others/the-local-transformation-plan
Asked by: Laura Farris (Conservative - Newbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to communicate the importance of a healthy and balanced diet to the general public.
Answered by Jo Churchill
The Government supports behaviour change through the Eatwell guide, catering guidance, its social marketing campaigns, the reduction and reformulation programme and providing advice to the consumer through the National Health Service website to promote making the healthier choice, the easiest choice.
We published ‘Tackling obesity: empowering adults and children to live healthier lives’ on 27 July. This strategy demonstrates an overarching campaign to reduce obesity, takes forward actions from previous chapters of the childhood obesity plan and sets our measures to get the nation fit and healthy, protect against COVID-19 and protect the NHS. The strategy is available at the following link:
Public Health England also launched Better Health, a campaign which helps people to make healthier choices by providing the most up to date evidence based healthy eating and physical activity advice including calorie intakes, portions of fruit and vegetables and recommended physical activity levels. As well as teaching skills to prevent weight gain and providing helpful tools like balanced recipes and the Food Scanner app which helps shoppers make healthier product choices, Better Health also supports people who wish to lose weight.
Asked by: Laura Farris (Conservative - Newbury)
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 with Public Health England (PHE) to address concerns of frontline NHS staff working in hospital settings with covid-19 positive patients that the current PHE guidance for non-core covid-19 treatment centres, which does not include gowns or visors, leaves staff underprotected.
Answered by Jo Churchill
The COVID-19 pandemic guidance on infection prevention and control (IPC) is issued jointly by the Department, Public Health Wales, Public Health Agency Northern Ireland, Health Protection Scotland, Public Health England and NHS England. The IPC guidance is available to view at the following link:
The guidance provides advice on the use of personal protective equipment by healthcare staff which is dependent on the clinical care and procedures being undertaken, and the closeness of contact between staff and patients.