The Department has made no such assessment. It is important that the right support is in place, including for those affected by extreme weather events. NHS England has clinical guidelines on dealing with major incidents, including on providing psychosocial support for both patients and staff.

Talking therapies are available remotely so people can access help safely from home and the National Health Service is working to ensure the option of face-to-face support is provided to people with serious mental health illnesses across all ages where it is clinically safe to do so.

The UK Health Security Agency has published an Adverse Weather and Health Plan to provide information to assist health professionals and public agencies to understand and mitigate the mental health risks posed by adverse weather conditions. It is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/adverse-weather-and-health-plan

No specific assessment has been made. On 5 April 2023, NHS England published a national framework and operational guidance for autism assessment services. This guidance will help the National Health Service and local authorities improve autism assessment services and improve the experience for people referred to an autism assessment service. As referenced in the guidance, as part of an assessment process, when feasible, and consent-permitting, it can be useful to speak with professionals who are currently or have recently been in contact with the person, such as professionals working in health and social care, education, the criminal justice system or third sector organisations. The guidance is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/operational-guidance-to-deliver-improved-outcomes-in-all-age-autism-assessment-pathways-guidance-for-integrated-care-boards/

In addition, we expect integrated care boards (ICBs) to have due regard to relevant National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on autism when commissioning services, including autism assessments. It is the responsibility of ICBs to make available appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local population, in line with these NICE guidelines.

In response to a written question that I submitted, I was told that the Department of Health and Social Care holds no central data for diagnosis and treatment of those with eating disorders and has no idea how many mental health nurse appointments are available in GP surgeries, despite all the funding. Do Ministers agree that that is a disgrace?

Any unexpected or unintended incident which could have or did lead to harm to one or more patients can be recorded on the Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service, to support local and national learning. This would include incidents caused by surgical fires or burns.

Providers are encouraged to foster a positive safety culture among their staff, and ensure an appropriate local focus on incident recognition, recording, and response.

Recording onto LFPSE is a voluntary process, except where reporting to NHS England fulfils duties for other statutory mandatory requirements, such as reporting notifiable incidents to the Care Quality Commission (CQC). NHS England shares all such data with the CQC. Notifiable incidents include events resulting in “serious harm” or the death of a service user, and therefore the most serious surgical fires or burns are subject to mandatory reporting. However, providers are encouraged to record all patient safety incidents, irrespective of the level of harm, to support local and national learning.

Published National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures include a requirement for a risk assessment and management plan to minimise the risk of surgical fires in the perioperative environment. They require that multidisciplinary team training should involve rehearsal and analysis of typical and emergency scenarios, such as a surgical fire, and that prior to surgery, any fire risk and the management plan are discussed and confirmed.

LFPSE is not designed for performance management. However, it supports certain oversight functions within providers, including the ability to review all records submitted by staff, and to mark them as either meeting certain other requirements, such as notification to the CQC, or not. This supports good governance within the provider, encouraging scrutiny of recorded events, and the fulfilment of other statutory or national policy reporting requirements. LFPSE data is being made available to integrated care boards and regional teams to facilitate their roles in safety oversight and provider improvement support.

NHS England does not hold or collect information on the number of surgical fires which occur. Although incidents where serious harm and death are captured within LFPSE, and trusts may choose to record lower levels of harm, there is no category for surgical fires within the existing reporting system with which they could be counted and therefore any count would not be definitive.

Any unexpected or unintended incident which could have or did lead to harm to one or more patients can be recorded on the Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service, to support local and national learning. This would include incidents caused by surgical fires or burns.

Providers are encouraged to foster a positive safety culture among their staff, and ensure an appropriate local focus on incident recognition, recording, and response.

Recording onto LFPSE is a voluntary process, except where reporting to NHS England fulfils duties for other statutory mandatory requirements, such as reporting notifiable incidents to the Care Quality Commission (CQC). NHS England shares all such data with the CQC. Notifiable incidents include events resulting in “serious harm” or the death of a service user, and therefore the most serious surgical fires or burns are subject to mandatory reporting. However, providers are encouraged to record all patient safety incidents, irrespective of the level of harm, to support local and national learning.

Published National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures include a requirement for a risk assessment and management plan to minimise the risk of surgical fires in the perioperative environment. They require that multidisciplinary team training should involve rehearsal and analysis of typical and emergency scenarios, such as a surgical fire, and that prior to surgery, any fire risk and the management plan are discussed and confirmed.

LFPSE is not designed for performance management. However, it supports certain oversight functions within providers, including the ability to review all records submitted by staff, and to mark them as either meeting certain other requirements, such as notification to the CQC, or not. This supports good governance within the provider, encouraging scrutiny of recorded events, and the fulfilment of other statutory or national policy reporting requirements. LFPSE data is being made available to integrated care boards and regional teams to facilitate their roles in safety oversight and provider improvement support.

NHS England does not hold or collect information on the number of surgical fires which occur. Although incidents where serious harm and death are captured within LFPSE, and trusts may choose to record lower levels of harm, there is no category for surgical fires within the existing reporting system with which they could be counted and therefore any count would not be definitive.

The United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is responsible for the published official and national statistics on vaccination coverage and adapts its data collection and reporting to incorporate new vaccines and changes to the immunisation programmes.

UKHSA monitors vaccination coverage of all the routine immunisation programmes in England. Data for preschool immunisations is monitored through the COVER programme (Cover of Vaccinations Evaluated Rapidly). Data is collected and collated quarterly and annually measuring coverage at ages one, two and five years. The latest quarterly reports covers the period January to March 2023:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/cover-of-vaccination-evaluated-rapidly-cover-programme-2022-to-2023-quarterly-data/quarterly-vaccination-coverage-statistics-for-children-aged-up-to-5-years-in-the-uk-cover-programme-january-to-march-2023

UKHSA also monitors and publishes data for England on the coverage of vaccinations offered to adolescents, adults, and the selective programmes, including shingles, PPV, pertussis for pregnant women, human papillomavirus (HPV), Td/IPV adolescent vaccine, MenACWY vaccine, influenza, BCG. Vaccination Uptake data can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vaccine-uptake#cover-of-vaccination-evaluated-rapidly-programme.

Mental health data, including data on inpatient services funded by the National Health Service, are kept under regular review by NHS England and are subject to ongoing improvement. This includes a focus on improving data quality, and identifying and publishing key metrics, with the aim of monitoring both the activity within services and the quality of care delivered.

In addition, the rapid review we are conducting into mental health inpatient settings has a specific focus on how we use data and evidence, including complaints, feedback, and whistleblowing alerts, to identify risks to safety.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is utilising strong surveillance capabilities, rooted in the highest-quality data systems, data architecture and analytics to anticipate, prepare for and respond to health risks. UKHSA will exploit the potential of new techniques and technologies across a range of disciplines.

We are continuously updating our pandemic plans to reflect the latest scientific information and lessons learned from exercises and our response to emergencies, including COVID-19.

NHS England publish the Autism Diagnostic Waiting Times Statistics, including an interactive dashboard, that shows the number of people waiting for an autism assessment. The NHS England Learning Disability and Autism programme team are working to support data quality improvements engaging with regional colleagues and system providers.

Based on the latest available data in the Mental Health Data Set, published in December 2022, the total number of people with an open referral for an autism assessment was 125,109 in July 2022. Of these patients, 105,622 patients have been waiting for at least 13 weeks.

The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety (IMMDS) review update published in December 2022 outlines our next steps in this area, including taking forward the NHS England outcomes registries programme in England. NHS England are working to expand the coverage and breadth of existing outcome registries which will deliver data collections that contain patient, device and outcome-level data. Exemplar registries already record 600,000 to 700,000 patients a year with device details.

As set out in the IMMDS update, the aim is to increase outcome registry coverage from 15% to 80% of Class III implants and Class IIb therapeutic devices over the next three years. The outcome registries will allow traceability and patient outcome data to be gathered for priority medical specialties and therapeutical areas, prioritised according to patient and clinic risk. The outcome registries will be unified under one platform.

We are in discussions with the devolved Governments to develop a United Kingdom wide approach that will enable secure data sharing, system interoperability and coverage where it is appropriate to do so.

The Medicines and Pregnancy Registry’s publication is an analysis of existing administrative patient data as a proof of concept, to establish the use and value of these data sets in supporting robust and sustainable medicine registries. The data produced is designed to support the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in monitoring the success of the valproate pregnancy prevention plan and to enable the health and care system to understand outcomes for women prescribed antiepileptics during pregnancy and their children and improve patient care.

NHS England has made guidance available for services related to specific care pathways to improve the data submitted to the Mental Health Services Dataset and issued guidance for the recording of outcomes data, access data and for the measurement of waiting times for non-urgent access to community children and young people’s mental health services. NHS England is providing additional support to assist local areas to overcome local data flow challenges and to make data products such as dashboards routinely available for services to review. Existing guidance is being improved to support local National Health Service commissioners supporting voluntary and community sector providers to submit data to the Mental Health Services Dataset and question and answer sessions have been delivered to respond to enquiries and examine barriers to submitting the data.

The information requested is not held centrally. NHS Digital is producing a report related to the incidence of re-operations and mortality following pelvic floor procedures and aims to release the results by spring 2023, following consultation with clinicians.

The information requested is not held centrally.

The Care Quality Commission publishes inspection reports and a monthly care directory with ratings online. Its inspection reports can include the latest ratings for the services and providers inspected and are used by the regulator to highlight where there may be repeated failings by regulated providers.

While specific data is not collected, changes in the prevalence of mental ill-health in children and young people is monitored through the Mental Health of Children and Young People in England survey. The latest survey published in 2021 is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2021-follow-up-to-the-2017-survey

The prevalence of mental ill-health in adults is monitored through the NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, with the latest survey expected to be published in 2024. We also routinely monitor changes to National Health Service mental health service demand. The Office for National Statistics is undertaking analysis on the cost of living and depression in adults, which is due to be published on 6 December 2022.

The United Kingdom has an established policy to manage modern slavery risks and we continue to take action to limit exposure to human rights and modern slavery abuses in supply chains. Governmental commercial teams are required to undertake due diligence to ensure risks in supply chains are mitigated. Managing risks within existing contracts is the responsibility of those who are party to the contract and decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis.

There is no specified procurement evaluation criteria in UK legislation or policy related to entities of Chinese origin and to take account of the national origin of companies would be against the principles in UK law related to equal treatment. The Department evaluates bids and if there is sufficient evidence of human rights or modern slavery abuses in any of the supply chains, we take appropriate steps to exclude them from that procurement. Procurement rules include ‘exclusion grounds’ of mandatory grounds, where contracting authorities must exclude and discretionary criteria, where they may exclude. If a bidder is convicted of an offence under section 1, 2 or 4 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, there is a mandatory exclusion. However, even if there is no conviction, strong evidence of breaches is likely to be grounds for discretionary exclusion.

BGI Genomics is a supplier on the National Microbiology Framework contract, launched in 2021. The mandatory and discretionary exclusion criteria was requested from all suppliers at the time the Framework was tendered. BGI Genomics was awarded a call-off contract from the Framework contract by the UK Health Security Agency in August 2021 which also involved compliance with mandatory and discretionary selection requirements. This call-off contract lapsed on 14 November 2021 and no further contract with BGI has been let.

The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review recommended that “a central patient-identifiable database should be created by collecting key details of the implantation of all devices at the time of the operation. This can then be linked to specifically created registers to research and audit the outcomes both in terms of the device safety and patient reported outcomes measures”. The Government accepted this recommendation.

In 2021/22, we worked with partners in the healthcare system to scope, test and cost methods of achieving a United Kingdom-wide medical device information system. This explored establishing national systems, expanding clinical registries and approaches to electronically tracking implanted medical devices at the point of care. We aim to publish an update on the implementation of the Review’s recommendations, including work on a medical device information system, in summer 2022.

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic there were significant reductions in rate of lower-limb major and minor amputations compared with the same period in the previous three years. As of January 2022, these rates have not yet increased.

The biennial National Diabetes Foot Care Audit has continued throughout the pandemic. The latest report was published on 11 May 2022 for the period July 2014 to March 2021 and is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/national-diabetes-footcare-audit/2014-2021

NHS England and NHS Improvement, the British Heart Foundation, the Resuscitation Council UK and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives have developed The Circuit, a national defibrillator network which will register defibrillators in the United Kingdom. This will assist ambulance services to identify the nearest defibrillator at the time of an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.