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Scottish and Welsh health ministers were banned from viewing thousands of coronavirus results at rapid test sites for weeks due to data restrictions imposed by the UK government.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) began establishing rapid testing centers across the UK to assess hospital staff and key workers for Covid-19 in early April, but the Scottish and Welsh ministers received the data for the first time at the end of last month.
The DHSC, which hired the accountancy firm Deloitte to run the program, initially decided to only give the results to individual patients, to the irritation of ministers in Scotland.
Initially, only patients in the hospital could be tested in the UK. The tests were then extended to NHS and nursing home staff. Now up to 10 million essential workers and their families showing coronavirus symptoms can request a test through a government website.
The essential worker list is the same one used to allow the children of key workers to continue going to school during closure. In addition to health and social work personnel, the list includes teachers, judges, some lawyers, religious personnel, and journalists who provide public broadcasting services.
Also included are local officials, the police, armed service personnel, fire and rescue service personnel, immigration officers, and prison and probation personnel. Some of the private sector staff also qualify, including veterinarians, food production, essential financial services and information technology, as well as those working in the oil, gas, electricity and water sectors.
Matthew Weaver
As a result, none of the positive test results found in Scotland and Wales were included in their daily updates on Covid-19 cases in April, and could not be included in the pandemic planning of those governments.
The very limited data disclosure policies of the DHSC meant that those results could not be shared with the Scottish and Welsh governments, nor with the hospitals these staff worked for, even if they were anonymous. English hospitals reported that some test results were late, lost, or given to the wrong workers.
UK government ministers and health officials described rapid testing centers as a key part of the “five pillars” strategy to tackle the pandemic, saying that their production was essential to deliver on Matt Hancock’s promise on April 2, carry out 100,000 tests per day. End of April.
When the Edinburgh testing center opened on April 16, Lord Bethell, a UK government health minister, said it was a “national effort to increase testing capacity for the coronavirus to protect the vulnerable, support our NHS and ultimately save lives. “
DHSC said the overall results of those tests were included in the UK totals released by the UK government each day. However, he declined to publicly disclose how many tests he carried out at rapid test centers in different parts of the UK.
In Scotland and Wales, the UK government had opened rapid test centers at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness airports and Cardiff City football stadium before changing the data protection rules.
The Glasgow and Cardiff sites began testing almost three weeks before the rules were amended. Delegate governments were told each day how many tests had been conducted at the rapid test centers, but not what those tests discovered.
The Scottish government said knowing how many key workers were positive was “essential to meaningfully report the tests conducted at these facilities.” Officials in Edinburgh said they were told that the DHSC had decided that only the patient would know if his results were negative or positive.
The governments of the United Kingdom, Wales and Scotland told the Guardian that they finally resolved the data protection problem in late April.
In contrast, the Scottish government had been giving the UK government a full daily breakdown of all its test program data from March onwards, including the number of tests, the number of people tested, the results of those tests and their total test capacity.
The Scottish government said that although the DHSC now shares the results of the rapid testing center, the figures released by Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon at lunchtime still do not include UK government data because they must verify that are accurate and solid. .
While the figures are now being used within the Scottish NHS, the data may not yet be publicly available until early May, one month after the opening of the first Scottish center.
A Welsh government spokesperson said: “We identified problems related to data storage of test centers from the beginning and we worked with the UK government and Deloitte to ensure that NHS Wales retained the data.”
A DHSC spokesperson confirmed that there was a delay. He said: “We have made it clear from the start that we would be delighted to provide this data to the Scottish National Services of the NHS and have now done so after receiving the necessary technical and legal safeguards from Scotland.
“A new digital system has now been built that will allow the rapid flow of this data to the relevant public health authorities, including in Scotland, in the future.”
