Coronavirus: Disease Control
(asked on 20th April 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when his Department plans to publish guidance for local authorities on protecting extremely vulnerable people from covid-19; and what steps his Department is taking to ensure that people with dementia are protected from covid-19 at the peak of the outbreak.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government issued guidance to local authorities on 24 March and will soon be issuing updated guidance to local authorities on protecting the clinically extremely vulnerable. Public safety throughout this period is the Government’s top priority – this includes keeping safe society’s most vulnerable, including those with dementia.
The Chief Medical Officer has led a thorough clinical review process to identify six categories of underlying clinical conditions which place someone at very high risk of severe illness if they contract COVID-19. Dementia covers a wide range of needs and varying levels of severity, so it has not been included as an underlying health condition. By advising people to shield, we are advising them to stay at home at all times and avoid all contact with others; this public health advice would not be appropriate for many people with dementia and could lead to a deterioration in their condition.
While people with dementia are not automatically added to the list of the clinically extremely vulnerable, general practitioners and hospital clinicians have the discretion to add individual patients to the list based on careful, clinical assessments of each individual’s needs.
The Government and civil society are providing additional support to people even where they are not clinically extremely vulnerable to COVID-19. The Government is providing local authorities with an additional £3.2 billion of un-ringfenced funding to help meet additional service pressures as a result of COVID-19.
The Government has also launched a new set of webpages for those who need additional support due to the pandemic across a range of issues, which are regularly updated at the following link: