Health Professions: Coronavirus

(asked on 16th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether immediate access to covid-19 testing will be made available to (a) vital staff and (b) primary care staff to avoid unnecessary self-isolation.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 26th March 2020

Our first priority is to make sure that we use those tests on the people who need them most.

Public Health England has rolled its own test out to a number of National Health Service collaborators to increase daily testing capacity and it is evaluating commercial tests to allow the NHS to consider faster tests. On 17 March the Prime Minister announced that capacity would increase to 25,000 a day in two weeks

Testing of healthcare workers is happening already and will continue to expand as capacity increases.

Reticulating Splines