COVID-19: Testing for Care Home Staff

Part of 6. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:09 pm on 15 July 2020.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:09, 15 July 2020

[Inaudible.] Sorry, I've managed to be muted. It shouldn't come as a surprise to the Member or others to know that I wasn't watching the S4C documentary while I was working last night. I can multitask and cook, but I can't watch the tv and do the work that I need to do at the same time.

I've noted a range of the measures that we need to prepare for, and, in fact, the Academy of Medical Sciences report, commissioned for the UK Government about England, is, obviously, largely relevant for us here in Wales, as we look to prepare for the autumn and the winter. And I have made reference to the fact that we do need to make use of the time we have now in the summer to prepare for what may happen. We know there will be more respiratory tract infections and symptoms; we know there'll be more use made of our testing capacity here in Wales, which is why we've built it up now. We'll expect to use more of it when we need to make use of more of it, when there are many more symptomatic people who—as has been mentioned before—will either want to know they have coronavirus and need to continue self-isolating, or will be released by a positive result to go back about their business. So, we will definitely want to maximise the use of our NHS Wales laboratories, and that's why the work that's being done on improving the efficiency of that laboratory turnaround is so important.

We'll need to make some difficult choices, I think, because our budgets are incredibly strained and pressured, but we'll need to find a way to deliver a staffing model that allows a more significant staffing of our NHS Wales laboratories to maximise not just the capacity, practical daily capacity, but actually the ability to turn that around promptly, rather than being able to do that in a way that doesn't deliver the sort of speed that I recognise is important to have effective contact tracing. But we have a system that we've been proud to create as a public service, which is delivering very effective contact tracing with very high levels of success, and I'm very proud of the work that councils have done, together with the NHS, across the country to do so.

When it comes to your points about the lighthouse labs and the way they've been developed—that UK programme has managed to deliver significant extra capacity, and it is what we're using largely with the drive-through centres we've created in conversation with the UK Government, and that has meant that we now have significant extra capacity available to us, and we can protect that NHS capacity for, in particular, symptomatic people who we referred to in parts of the care system. Now, that does mean, though, we had a challenge—. And this is why we didn't go into the UK testing programme earlier, because we couldn't get the data, and your point about GPs being blind to that—well, actually we didn't know at all. We'd have known that people had had tests, but not known what the results were, and that was the position that other countries found themselves in earlier.

We are now in a position where we can both publish the number of tests—you have a unified publication every day of tests carried out in Wales—and we see the flow not just going to our contact tracing system from those lighthouse labs, but it goes through the limb system, which I'm sure you'll be familiar with, but other people who don't happen to work in the health service aren't. That means that it is going back into the patient record. Now, we didn't have that earlier. It is now available to us. So, people who provide care for individuals should see that on the individual patient record, and it will enable us to actually undertake proper contact tracing. So, we've not just got the numbers for the tests being undertaken, but, as the Royal College of Pathologists has advised all of us, it's testing for a purpose, and that purpose is part of how we keep Wales safe.