Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 December 2020
I am grateful to Ms Lennon for her very important questions. The 65,000 figure was split between our expanding NHS capacity and expansion in the Lighthouse capacity. Even though we do not yet have the east hub online, largely because of building issues to do with fire safety and so on, which we need to fix, we still believe that we will be on track collectively to meet that 65,000 target.
Ms Lennon is absolutely right about the importance of extending testing to care-at-home staff. From memory, I believe that it is from the early part of January that we intend to extend regular asymptomatic testing to care-at-home staff. As I said—Ms Lennon will be well aware of this—they are a more complex group of staff to reach on a weekly basis so that we can input the data from those tests, because they are in neither hospitals nor care home settings. However, with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and our other partners, we have worked through how we might do that, and we will phase the roll-out, again starting with the areas where the virus has the highest prevalence and working our way through. We will start that from mid-January.
On that and other matters, I commit, as I always do, to ensuring that members are kept up to date. If there are changes between now and the Parliament returning after the recess, I will write to all members with those changes, but I will give an update as soon as we are all back after the recess.
Ms Lennon is also right about people declining to test. We saw a significant proportion of that when we initially rolled out weekly testing to care home staff, and we undertook with Scottish Care providers and our colleagues in the unions a programme of persistent and consistent information, including some short videos about the importance of testing, why to do it and what not to be worried about, and some surgery work to address people’s concerns about it. We have seen the number drop significantly.
We see some of that reluctance to be tested on a weekly basis among our NHS staff, and I kind of understand why. It is not the easiest test to undertake and it is intrusive. Using a similar approach, but also working closely with our unions and our boards, and led by our chief nursing officer, we are looking to see what more we need to do there to reduce that number.
My final point on that is that we must always remember that, setting aside those who decline to test, we will always have a difference between the eligible number and those who are tested. At any time, 50 staff could be eligible in a particular area, but a number of them may be off because of ill health or maternity leave, so we will never get 100 per cent. The decline-to-test figure is the one that we need to pay real attention to, and we are doing that.