No ‘immediate prospect’ of mass NHS staff testing

LONDON: The government is coming under increasing pressure over Covid-19 tests as healthcare leaders warned there is “no immediate prospect” of mass NHS staff testing.

Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, said maximum testing capacity in the UK was currently “very constrained” at around 13,000 tests per day.

At present, the focus is on testing patients in hospital to see if they have coronavirus, with NHS trusts told earlier in the week they should use up to 15 per cent of any spare testing capacity for NHS staff.Health Secretary Matt Hancock has now scrapped that cap, telling NHS hospital labs to use all spare capacity to test their frontline workers. It comes as Housing and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick admitted on Wednesday that just 900 NHS staff were tested over the weekend as staff testing is rolled out.

He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “Clearly that’s a low number but one we want to build on significantly. We now have capacity today to be testing 12,750 people and we expect that within a couple of days to be 15,000. So we should now have the growing capacity to test NHS staff in addition to the patients in critical care.”

Jenrick denied the government and Public Health England (PHE) would only agree to centralised testing after claims from scientists and universities that their offers of help have been rejected. He said the government was willing to “work with any provider” who had the “right infrastructure and skills” and urged them to get in touch. The minister also said he expects there to be 25,000 tests per day by the “middle of April”.