The language has officially changed from health protection to health security - with the launch of the UK Health Security Agency, or UKHSA.
Will cover pandemic prevention and response, communicable disease, and external threats.
Chief Exec will be Dr Jenny Harries (Dep CMO with hugely impressive public health background)
Chair is Ian Peters, current Chair of @NHSBartsHealth
The challenge (as ever) will be maintaining interest and funding for the agency in between crises.
Stresses importance of relationships with DsPH, although no mention yet of local PHE Health Protection Teams who have also been critical in local response as well.
Lots of discussion also about the role of Integrated Care Systems putting the weight of the NHS budget behind the prevention agenda.
I suspect there will be many suggesting that it might be nice to also put some more weight behind local gov and local gov public health budgets.
Health inequalities not mentioned in the speech - we know how COVID has dramatically exposed and exacerbated inequalities.
This picked up by Cllr Ian Hudspeth, highlighting the critical importance of addressing inequalities, and the role of local gov in addressing these.
And the 'health promotion' aspects of PHE to come in the coming days.
This will include health improvement, health care PH, academic PH + hopefully the inequalities functions of PHE. And in questions this suggests it may be departmental, not arms length/independent. TBC.
Asked about whether should increase local authority PH grant. The answer was essentially, no.
And am v nervous about the rhetoric of separating health 'security' from 'promotion'. The pandemic has shown how they are intricately linked and relationships need to be strengthened.
It will be very helpful to see detail of both over the coming few days.
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This week's PHE surveillance report is now out, covering 15-21 March. 🧵
Tl,dr:
- increasing case rates among 5-9y/o and 10-19y/o
- important geographic variation
- hospital data still improving
- vax going strong
- and inequalities persist.
Number of PCR and LFD tests done similar to the previous week, but positivity (percentage of tests that are positive) for PCR still trending down and is now 2.1%
For LFDs it's 0.19% compared with 0.15% the week before.
Case rates are falling less slowly, but they're still falling across all ages...
*except* 5-9y/o where they're up 59% to 63.5/100,000, and 10-19y/o where they're up 26% to 100.7/100,000.
This week's PHE surveillance report, covers 8th-14th March. 🧵
Tl,dr:
- cases falling but LFDs making it a harder to follow trends
- Still important inequalities by local authority, ethnicity, & deprivation.
- And good news on vaccines and seroprevalence
case rates continue to drop, but increasingly difficult to interpret pillar 2 data (community testing) here as it includes both lateral flow devices (LFDs) for those without symptoms, and PCR tests for those with symptoms.
This is laid out here - LFD test use over 5m in the most recent week reported, with positivity 0.15% compared with 2.4% among PCR tests.
There's no specific remit letter and whilst a new strategy is awaited (see @CommonsPAC report), the most recent T&T business plan from Dec 2020 covers four key priority areas.
For 'Team of Teams' - it's a lots of local gov led programmes: community testing, local contact tracing, support for self-isolation, and local outbreak management.
Case numbers and percentage testing positive (positivity) still falling across community testing (pillar 2) and health care worker/those in clinical need tests (pillar 1).
The steep drop in P2 positivity is due to the massive jump in LFD use (lateral flow devices for rapid testing among people without symptoms)
2.8m done between 1st-7th March, with a positivity of 0.17% compared with 1.7m done the week before. LFD use will rise further next wk.