HPA (Hansard, 27 January 2003)

§ Chris Grayling
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps he is taking to maintain intelligence and service delivery in health protection after 1 April 2003 across the new structure for health protection. [90051]

§ Ms Blears
We propose to establish the Health Protection Agency as a special health authority from 1 April 2003. As outlined in my response of 20 January 2003,Official Report, column 130W, to the hon. Member, the Department has identified interim organisational arrangements to ensure that the HPA can maintain intelligence and service delivery at national level. Similar arrangements are being finalised at regional and local level, including the identification of interim leads on microbiology services at regional level, to co-ordinate and support the public health outputs of HPA and national health service microbiology laboratories.

§ Chris Grayling
To ask the Secretary of State for Health whether the action plan for the creation of the HPA has been updated since 30 November 2002. [90063]

§ Ms Blears
The action plan is regularly updated.

§ Chris Grayling
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what assessment he has made of the ability of the HPA to respond to a biological attack on the UK during the first six months of its operations. [90070]
674W

§ Ms Blears
We propose to establish the Health Protection Agency (HPA) as a special health authority from 1 April 2003. The establishment of the HPA will improve our ability to respond to the deliberate release of biological agents and other hazards. In particular, HPA will be able to tackle incidents in a very structured way, especially those where it is not clear at the outset what the nature of the problem might be.
We shall be looking to the HPA to deliver a robust service, including the response to outbreaks caused by deliberate release of biological agents. We envisage that local, regional and national public health teams will be assisted by better microbiological services consisting of a complementary network of local public health and regional microbiologists, working with others at the national level, all of whom will have responsibility for operational support in the event of a major incident, including biological attacks. Interim management arrangements are being put in place at national, regional and local level to ensure that the HPA will be able to address key threats from its inception.
Surveillance to detect untoward events and outbreaks will continue to be monitored by the communicable disease surveillance centre. This new, nationally consistent, coherent and co-ordinated approach offers better public health security to detect and respond to outbreaks of infection.