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 ensure that the NHS 111 service is adequately prepared to deal with the potential effect of a future escalation of COVID-19 cases in the UK.

The United Kingdom is extremely well prepared for this type of outbreak – we are one of the first countries in the world to develop a test for the new virus.

The National Health Service is always ready to provide world class care to patients whether they have a common illness, or an infectious disease never seen here before.

A process has been worked through between NHS 111 and Public Health England to provide self-isolation advice, collect and share contact details for anyone who calls and is asymptomatic and reports returning from specific areas with ongoing transmission of COVID-19 within the previous 14 days. NHS 111 has continued to update their algorithms and processes when changes to the case definition have been made.