Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 6 May 2020.
Llywydd, I thank Paul Davies for that. He will know that, in answering questions from him last week, I said then that the Welsh Government was reviewing the evidence about testing in care homes and looking to see whether our testing regime could be further extended. I said that to the Member on Wednesday, and on Friday, the health Minister set out the practical steps that we would take. The Member asks about the evidence that we have drawn on in making that change. Well, I can tell him that we drew on studies from Singapore and from Spain, from a Public Health England pilot study into six London care homes, on a report for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in New York, on nursing home sector COVID experience there. We've drawn on evidence from Washington and we've drawn on the UK Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine's systematic report on evidence on how best to contain the spread of coronavirus in the care home sector.
That report identified five different ways in which the spread of coronavirus could be contained, and testing is only one of them. The systematic review puts emphasis on hand hygiene, on environmental decontamination, on staff rotas in care homes and the way in which staff can be rota-ed in order to reduce the risk of coronavirus being imported into care homes, on restrictions on visitors to care homes and then, fifthly and finally, on measures in relation to testing.
I said to the Member last week that I had not seen any clinical evidence that led me to believe that testing of non-symptomatic residents and staff in care homes where there is no coronavirus in circulation had a clinical value. That was confirmed in the evidence that came to Ministers last week, and that is why we will not, at this point, be doing that in Wales. If the clinical evidence changes, then we will follow the evidence.
The Member started by asking for evidence and then asked me to do something for which there is no evidence, and we will not be doing that. Our position was set out in Vaughan Gething's statement on Friday of last week and, essentially, it is about doing more to prevent coronavirus getting into care homes where there is none today, and then doing more in those care homes where there is symptomatic spread, in order to make the management of the virus in those homes more effective.