Yvette Cooper: holding answer 28 February 2002 I am advised on matters of food safety by the Food Standards Agency. On each occasion where consignments of imported carcase meat have been found with remnants of spinal cord still attached, the matter has been vigorously pursued with the chief veterinary officer of the European Union member state of origin, and with the European Commission. Where the incident...
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: ...it when he talked about proportionality. The Joint Committee on Human Rights produced a most interesting report. My honourable friend, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health, Yvette Cooper, has now responded to the committee and laid out in a letter and a report the reasons why the Government believe that the evidence is persuasive and why it was entirely right that,...
Yvette Cooper: holding answer 25 February 2002 The level of funding voluntary hospices receive is a matter for local decision based on a strategic view of local palliative care services. We have required all cancer networks to develop costed strategic investment plans for palliative care, which will inform the wider National Health Service planning process through health improvement programmes and service...
Yvette Cooper: The NHS Cancer Plan set out our commitment to increase National Health Service investment in specialist palliative care (including hospices) by £50 million by 2004. This investment is intended to help tackle inequalities in access to specialist palliative care and enable the NHS to increase their contribution to the cost hospices incur in providing agreed levels of service. We have...
Yvette Cooper: holding answer 27 February 2002 The table sets out the numbers of notified cases of food poisoning for Coventry and the United Kingdom for 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. The numbers of notified cases of food poisoning are likely to underestimate considerably the actual incidence of food poisoning. Notified cases of food poisoning for Coventry and UK 1998–2001 Year Coventry United Kingdom...
Yvette Cooper: holding answer 27 February 2002 The Food Standards Agency has a programme of research the objectives of which are to increase the understanding of how an where pathogenic micro-organisms enter the food chain and to assess how specific food handling and production processes affect the survival, growth and toxin formation of micro-organisms in food. Details of recent research are available in...
Yvette Cooper: None. The Food Standards Agency, which is responsible for representing the UK at working level on these matters, is pressing for changes to EU labelling rules to require country of origin labelling on a wider range of foods, particularly meat products. It is also pressing for changes that would prevent misleading labelling by restricting the use of terms like Xproduce of . . ." to those foods...
Yvette Cooper: The number of available acute beds at midnight on 29 November 2001 in National Health Service Trusts in the areas listed is given in the table: Available acute beds at midnight on 29 November 2001 NHS Trust Total acute beds (a) Worcestershire Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust 764 Worcestershire Community & Mental Health NHS Trust 101 Gloucestershire East...
Yvette Cooper: Birmingham Heartlands and Solihull NHS Trust has been affected by the well-publicised problems with delayed discharges across the whole of Birmingham for most of last year. I am advised that following the allocation of additional XCash for Change" funding in November, there has been an improvement. However, there remain approximately 100 patients who are experiencing delayed transfers of care...
Yvette Cooper: Shropshire Health Authority currently employs 167 staff. This includes those staff contracted to the Health Authority who are currently working within Primary Care Groups.
Yvette Cooper: Responsibility for the content, standards, management and delivery of medical education is shared between regulatory bodies, for example the General Medical Council and the Specialist Training Authority, professional bodies, notably the medical Royal Colleges, universities, the Department of Health and the National Health Service. We expect that these bodies will take account of the latest...
Yvette Cooper: In the Communication from the Commission of the European Communities to the Council of Ministers, entitled XAction Plan for skills and mobility" (Document COM(2002)72—copy available in the Library), the Commission announced its intention to present a proposal early in 2003 for the introduction of an European Union-wide health card. We will look at this proposal constructively when received.
Yvette Cooper: We are not aware of Quat Phen being used within installed ventilation systems used in NHS hospitals with respect to combating MRSA. However antiseptics and antibiotics are used to treat people who are carriers of MRSA, are colonised with MRSA, or have local or systemic MRSA infections. The treatment used depends on the condition to be treated, and on the strain of MRSA.
Yvette Cooper: Thrombolysis treatment is available at all coronary care units. Providing thrombolysis for heart attack patients as quickly as possible is the subject of one of the standards set out in the National Service Framework, our ten-year programme for improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of coronary heart disease.
Yvette Cooper: A reply was sent on 13 February.
Yvette Cooper: I am advised by the Food Standards Agency that there are no current plans to introduce new licensing provisions for food businesses. The immediate priority for the Food Standards Agency, which has responsibility for food safety matters, is to improve standards generally among food businesses. It is doing this through initiatives to increase the uptake of food safety management systems...
Yvette Cooper: The Derbyshire Dales and South Derbyshire primary care trust will become operational on 1 April. Already, it is developing proposals to provide for the increasing population in that part of Derbyshire, to increase the number of GPs, to improve and extend practice premises and to increase access to NHS dentistry.
Yvette Cooper: The latest available evidence shows that the uptake of MMR at two years old stood at 84.2 per cent. in the summer and in the autumn of last year. The coverage by five years of age remained at more than 90 per cent., having fallen slightly compared with the previous quarters. Those figures were achieved despite extensive media coverage at the beginning of last year of unfounded claims of a...
Yvette Cooper: I congratulate the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride) on securing this debate. MMR is an extremely important issue which affects the lives of our children even before they are born, and I know that she feels strongly about it. However, I deeply regret the climate in which the debate is taking place and the opportunism that has been shown by some Opposition Members in discussing...
Yvette Cooper: I refer my hon. Friend to the reply I gave my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) on 31 January 2002, Official Report, columns 363–66W.
