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 impact of retiring the OHID Liver Disease Fingertips Profiles on the UK's ability to monitor steatotic liver disease indicators and meet the World Health Assembly resolution on steatotic liver disease adopted in May 2026.

The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) continues to monitor a wide range of indicators relating to steatotic liver disease, an umbrella term that includes a range of conditions where fat accumulates in liver cells causing dysfunction. Indicators include liver disease and alcoholic liver disease mortality, alcoholic liver disease and alcoholic related hospital admissions, as well as population levels of associated risk factors, including alcohol consumption, obesity, physical activity, diet, and smoking, situated in different profiles on Fingertips. The indicators only cover England.

OHID ceased to update non-alcoholic fatty liver disease hospital admissions rates and premature deaths, in people aged under 75 years old, on the Fingertips profiles in December 2025, as the indicators were not accurate assessments of that condition and only monitored the most severe forms rather than prevalence, and the level of the disease in the population.

Retiring the liver disease profile therefore has had little impact on our ability to monitor steatotic liver disease.