Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 November 2020
I do not think that I promise a lot and then do not deliver. The reason why members are getting this update today and not at any other point—when it would have been entirely possible to make an announcement, but it would have been an announcement with no substance—is that today we have a detailed delivery plan and I am confident that the dates that I am giving are those on which we will deliver. I think that that gives the public in Scotland and, more important, the people who need testing the respect that they deserve.
As I said, all patient-facing NHS staff will undergo routine weekly testing by the end of December—in a month’s time. The nature of the job that home care staff do means that they do not conveniently gather in one place on a regular basis before they go and do their job. We need to work out the logistics of that. If we can deliver routine weekly testing to them before March, we will do that because the work that they do is vital. The fact is that they will often visit five or possibly more homes in any one day, and they have arrangements for PPE.
The other point about home care staff—the First Minister explained this yesterday—relates to authorisation for non-clinical use of the lateral flow test. The lateral flow test is the best test to use in those circumstances because of the speed of the result, but there is not yet across the UK authorisation for anyone who is not clinical staff to use that test. We can make sure that it is used in care homes, where we have nursing staff, and by our NHS staff, given all the admissions to hospital, but home care workers are different. To make the testing go smoothly as part of their shift and not be something that they have to get on their day off, we need to get that authorisation, which will help us to roll the testing out further.
The two areas of complication are the nature of the home care job—including the fact that we do not conveniently find home care staff in a ward or a care home—and the need for authorisation for the widespread use of the lateral flow test among non-clinical workers. Those are the difficulties. As I have said, if we can do the testing more quickly, we will do that, but our current estimate, which is based on those two issues, is that it will—starting in January—take us until March to complete it.