Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 11 November 2020
I refer to the cabinet secretary to my remark a moment ago. We accept the Scottish Government’s amendment on that basis. We absolutely agree that, if the Government is rolling something out, it has to do it on a prioritised basis, but this Government has been prioritising things for months and we are still not testing everybody who needs to be tested.
Although there was a period of uncertainty at the start of the pandemic—in the foothills of the emergency—we now know that there are many who contract the virus but display no symptoms. They may never even know that they had it. That is why the best way to prevent a spike in infection in our hospitals, in our care homes and, crucially, as we have heard many times this afternoon, in care at home is to routinely test all staff, and with regularity.
Currently, a considerable number of health and social care workers are being tested, but there cannot be full confidence in the testing system until we know that that is happening with universality. We ask a lot of those workers, and the emergency has tested them like nothing before. They do not need the anxiety that they may be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease and, by extension, a danger to their patients or the people they care for.
People who work in social care but cannot currently access routine testing include staff who provide care at home, as we have heard; those in palliative care, where we would imagine that testing was critical; those in respite care and day care services; those who support children and young people or people without a home; and those who work in residential rehabilitation for drug addiction.
The Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland has been pressing for an expansion of routine testing for a long time, particularly for care at home. As we have heard, the Care Inspectorate estimates that 53,000 people work in care homes for adults and 71,000 people work in care at home. That is a huge group of people who are coming into contact with our most vulnerable citizens, many of whom were asked by this Government to shield for much of lockdown on a daily basis.
The pausing of cancer screening programmes during the first wave meant that, in Scotland, more than 100,000 people every month were no longer being screened for bowel, breast or cervical cancer. Although those services have restarted, it will be some time before the backlog has cleared. Cancer Research UK has called for routine, frequent and rapid Covid testing of all NHS staff in primary and secondary care to ensure that the restarting of those vital programmes happens and that we get the care that is needed to the people who have fallen behind in the prognosis of their condition.
Liberal Democrats and members across the chamber have been calling for a wider roll-out of testing for some time. We are now into winter and time is running out to upscale testing before the busy winter period and the drain on resources hits with full effect.
Alison Johnstone was absolutely right to say that Slovakia tested millions of people on the same day—and that it was antigen testing, not antibody testing, which is fast-track testing. We need to be more ambitious for Scotland. There is a pilot of mass testing in Liverpool and we know that testing is one of the strongest defences against the spread of the virus; it has to start with the testing of the people in health and social care on whom we depend.
The Scottish Government expects to be able to process 65,000 PCR tests a day from December, which is welcome. However, the rate of expansion is not particularly fast.
I can see that I am running out of time. We know that the NHS is always under a lot of pressure in winter. We must do all that we can to mitigate that this year, more than ever. Testing all our health and social care staff is a good place to start.