Question reference: S5W-34212
- Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 22 December 2020
-
Current status: Answered by Mairi Gougeon on 19 January 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how many care homes have carried out lateral flow testing for visitors in each week of December 2020, broken down by local authority area.
Answer
We began rolling out lateral flow testing for care home visitors on 7 December to 14 early adopter care homes across 5 local authority areas.
Two of our three new NHS regional lab hubs went live on a phased basis last week with the West and the North hub are now receiving samples. The East regional hub will be operational by the end of January.
Processing the weekly tests of 42% of care home staff has now moved to our NHS labs as planned and we will complete that transition again by the end of January.
All Care Homes now have the equipment for Lateral Flow Testing and a rolling programme of training is underway to provide testing for care home visitors with Lateral Flow Testing to support professional visitors to care homes from the beginning of January.
Further data on lateral flow is available in the Public Health Scotland Weekly Statistic Report: https://beta.isdscotland.org/find-publications-and-data/population-health/covid-19/covid-19-statistical-report/