Coronavirus: Disease Control

(asked on 1st June 2020) - View Source

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 people with disabilities and long-term health conditions can have independent lives and are not marginalised by the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Helen Whately Portrait
Helen Whately
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 8th June 2020

We are committed to supporting disabled people and those with long-term conditions through every stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and are working across Government to ensure that disabled people are able to get the support they need. The steps we are taking include:

- Provision of guidance and advice for health and social care providers and disabled people, with disabled people who are deemed to be extremely clinically vulnerable advised to shield;

- Ensuring that there are now dedicated shopping hours for disabled people;

- Making available the NHS Volunteer Responders programme to help support people who are vulnerable but not shielding, including disabled people;

- Local authorities have set up dedicated helplines to help connect people with local level support or signpost people to local support programmes;

- Working across Government on the accessibility of COVID-19 public health information guidance and other reasonable adjustments that may be needed for disabled people during the pandemic. This includes exploring the safety and use of transparent personal protective equipment face masks in health and social settings; and

- The Department has announced £22 million of Government funding will be awarded to mental health, ambulance, social care, learning disabilities, autism and dementia charities to help support their work during the current COVID-19 outbreak.

We are urgently working to better understand the effect of COVID-19 on disabled people’s health outcomes by identifying the current data available, any gaps and how these could be addressed, including exploring research opportunities.

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