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 patients with heart and circulatory diseases are able to safely access (a) standard levels of care and (b) specialist services in the community during the covid-19 outbreak.

The suspension of non-urgent elective operations did not apply to emergency admissions, urgent cancer treatment and other clinically urgent care.

As a result of the measures put in place to tackle COVID-19, we now appear to be passing the peak of new cases and it has been decided to release and redeploy some of the treatment capacity that could have been needed while the number of COVID-19 patients was rising sharply.

All National Health Service organisations have therefore been asked to step-up non-COVID-19 services as soon as possible, starting with the most urgent.

The NHS is running an ‘Open for Business’ media campaign, encouraging all patients in need of urgent or emergency medical care to seek appropriate treatment including, where appropriate, attendance at accident and emergency.

This media campaign specifically targets heart attack patients, as well as anyone else with a potentially serious health condition.