Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they will take to rebalance geographic disparities in access to care and treatment for individuals suffering from (1) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and (2) asthma.

Core20PLUS5 is a national NHS England approach to inform action to reduce healthcare inequalities at both a national and system level. The approach provides a vehicle for targeted interventions to detect and treat those diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which are major contributors to inequalities in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy.

The focus for action on respiratory health is to increase vaccination uptake in people with COPD to avoid exacerbations leading to emergency treatment in hospital and inpatient care.

Core20PLUS5 for children and young people includes asthma as one of its priority areas. The primary focus is to address over reliance on reliever medications and decrease the number of asthma attacks.

The Core20PLUS5 approach has been mobilised across the National Health Service using a variety of methods to deliver change examples of this work for COPD.