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 (a) promote (i) research and (ii) interventions that focus on understanding the social and structural determinants impacting HIV transmission among women and (b) use the results of research to guide prevention efforts.

The HIV Action Plan is the cornerstone of our approach in England to drive forward progress and achieve our goal to end new HIV transmissions, AIDS and HIV-related deaths within England by 2030. A key principle of our approach is to ensure that all populations benefit equally from improvements made in HIV outcomes, including women.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) publish a yearly monitoring and evaluation report, which sets out key indicators to track progress towards our ambitions in the HIV Action Plan, including by gender, and this data helps system partners to understand where services can be improved and made more accessible to key populations. The next report will be published on 1 December 2023.

The Department commissions research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), which also funds Health Protection Research Units (HPRUs) to help build an evidence base for public health policy and practice in partnership with UKHSA. The NIHR HPRU in bloodborne and sexually transmitted infections at University College London has ongoing research to determine the levels of awareness of and interest in HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among women and how this relates to equity factors and HIV risk.