Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 19 May 2020
Both areas that the member asks about are important. On the situation in hospitals, our chief nursing officer is, with her clinical colleagues, working through some additional advice that she intends to give on what more we can do in the hospital setting to minimise transmission of the virus there. We already have red and green zones, but there are other steps that it might be wise and useful for us to take, including to minimise as far as possible transmission between staff from one zone to another. Once we have that advice, I will update members on it and on any subsequent decisions.
Alison Johnstone is also right about the importance of not transferring staff from one home to another, and certainly not without testing to ensure that the new staff that are introduced are clear of the virus at that point, bearing in mind that the test tells people only whether they are positive on the day that they are tested.
Another thing that is really important, which is why we have now involved not only our directors of public health but our nurse directors and medical directors, is to ensure that we can offer NHS staff to those homes rather than have them move their own staff from one care home to another, not least because, in doing that, they might make the home that they take staff from vulnerable in terms of its staff rotas and therefore its capacity to do effective infection prevention and control.
The chief nursing officer has been clear that NHS and care home staff should be tested before they first go into a home. A number of our health boards have already provided NHS staff to care homes in order to backfill their rotas and, in some instances, to increase the level of staffing in a care home where there is an active case.