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 help housebound constituents in Darlington constituency to access the Covid-19 Vaccine Spring Booster.

The Primary Care Network (PCN) in Darlington chose not to opt-in to the provision of the spring booster vaccination programme and vaccination of Darlington housebound patients is being carried out by two providers: A community pharmacy based in Bishop Auckland and Eston PCN.

These two providers are working together to vaccinate the 800 patients identified as housebound by general practitioner (GP) practices in Darlington, with the information co-ordinated by the local GP federation, Primary Health Care Darlington.

Housebound patients have been placed in cohorts based on their postcode area and a software model is being used to produce the most efficient route from a travel perspective. The providers are currently in the process of contacting patients to arrange a vaccination date.

Vaccinations are being delivered until 30 June and housebound patients can, and will, be vaccinated up until the end of the programme. The first two weeks of the vaccination booster programme (which started on 3 April in England) saw a strong focus placed on care home residents and locally NHS England have been delivering vaccinations to housebound patients over the past four weeks.

The latest data shows that 41.8% of NHS North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board’s (ICB) housebound patients have received a vaccine to date, against the ICB average of 41.9%. A comparison of the vaccination uptake rate for housebound patients against the 2022 position shows a very positive improvement of 25.7%.