Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department has taken to improve awareness of sickle cell disease among healthcare professionals.

The Government is committed to improving the lives of those living with rare diseases such as sickle cell disease, and published the UK Rare Diseases Framework in January 2021, providing the high-level approach for rare diseases. The framework outlines future priorities including increasing awareness of rare diseases among healthcare professionals. In England we publish action plans annually to address these priorities. As part of this plan we committed to developing an innovative digital educational resource, ‘GeNotes’, providing healthcare professionals with relevant and concise information to support patient management, linking to the NHS Genomic Test Directories, and signposting to extended learning opportunities. This resource includes information on sickle cell disease and is updated regularly.

There have been recent improvements to the haematology medical curriculum, with understanding sickle cell disease now described in the curriculum as a core competency. The National Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Programme has launched several products to support NHS England in raising awareness of sickle cell disease among healthcare professionals including NHS England’s Can you tell it's Sickle Cell campaign and e-learning module and a communications campaign to raise awareness of existing NHS England arrangements to support people with sickle cell disease to save money on the costs of regular prescriptions.