Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether pharmacy teams and other primary care health professions will have equal access to the personal protective equipment portal.

The majority of personal protective equipment (PPE) continues to be sourced by care providers themselves from wholesalers and as part of our commitment to ensure that the sector receives the PPE it needs, we are ensuring that wholesalers are equipped with the PPE needed for onward sale.

As part of our PPE distribution strategy we are exploring the most effective distribution routes for each provider type, including the potential expansion of the portal’s coverage to other sectors and types of provider.

The PPE Portal acts as an emergency top-up route for providers that cannot obtain sufficient PPE through their usual wholesaler routes. The Department has now invited around 21,000 general practitioners and small social care providers to register and order through the PPE Portal, delivering more than 13 million items of PPE.