Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)Department Debates - View all Lindsay Hoyle's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
Yes. We have doubled the intensive care capacity, which, alongside the Nightingale, has been a remarkable achievement of the NHS. There are now green and blue areas in hospitals, or whole hospitals, depending on the geography—in a rural area, we could not make a whole hospital covid-secure or covid-free, because it would have to serve both covid and non-covid patients. That separation of the NHS into blue and green areas is an important part of their being able to reduce the impact of infection control procedures, which are obviously having a big impact on the provision of services.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
What is the current level of funding for research projects into the long-term effects of covid-19 funded from the National Institute for Health Research, in which I think the Government claim to put £1 billion?
Matt Hancock
I am absolutely thrilled to get a question on the problem of having too much testing capacity, as opposed to too little. We have one of the biggest testing capacities in the world. We have built that almost from scratch as a country, and we must use it effectively. We have, for instance, rolled out the extra testing in the NHS that the Chair of the Select Committee was asking about earlier. We have rolled out the weekly testing of staff and the monthly testing of patients in care homes. We will follow a clinical path.
My hon. Friend asked about teachers. We are currently survey testing teachers to find out if they are more at risk than the general population, in the same way that care workers, care home workers and NHS staff are. If they are, we will put asymptomatic testing in place. We are doing exactly the same survey testing for taxi drivers, because taxi drivers are at higher risk than the rest of the country. If he will forgive me, we are taking a scientific approach to how we allocate that capacity, but it is true that one of the policy challenges we face as a Department is making sure we use all the testing capacity, and long may that be so.
Mr Speaker
In order to allow the safe exit of hon. Members participating in this item of business, and the safe arrival of those participating in the next, I am now suspending the House for four minutes.