A vanguard Covid-19 testing facility for key NHS staff has dealt with more than 2,000 workers in the past month.
The hub set up for health and social care staff – or household contacts who have symptoms – is now swabbing visitors at the rate of almost 200 per day.
Health chiefs have announced its testing role has extended beyond NHS Tayside staff and health and social care partnership staff to include community pharmacy, care homes, local authority ambulance and prison services employees.
It will continue to expand to include routine staff and household contact testing for essential works in local charitable organisations for example Chest Heart and Stroke, Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.
This expansion of the groups of staff being tested has resulted in many more hundreds of key workers in other sectors beyond the NHS also being able to return to their essential roles.
NHS Tayside was in the vanguard in the UK as it made an early decision to proactively begin staff testing last month.
The health body said that in addition to staff testing, the community testing team had continued to offer a community testing service for patients, in particular in care homes, in collaboration with Angus, Dundee and Perth and Kinross Health and Social Care Partnerships and public health.
Critical Care Group manager, Susan Bean said: “Staff testing has reduced the impact of staff absence in key areas and made a significant contribution to the running of our essential services, both in NHS Tayside and the health and social care partnerships but also now to other key workers who can access the testing service.
The testing team is a new group of staff from various backgrounds who have come together to provide this service six days a week and their commitment and hard work has been unwavering. Thanks to them we are making sure we can keep services running as effectively as possible.
“It is vitally important that if people themselves or someone in their home is experiencing possible symptoms, that they stay at home. Being able to quickly test our staff or their household contacts, means that if they do not have Covid-19, they can resume work safely. It also means that those staff members who do have Covid-19 are identified and receive the appropriate advice, directly from the results management team.”
NHS Tayside chief executive Grant Archibald said: “As a board we could see that an early decision to enable the setting up of the hub would be invaluable in making sure we could be best placed to continue to staff all of our essential services, as our workforce really is our biggest asset.
“That foresight from our clinical teams and the early decision is why today we now have a well-established service which is making a difference to many members of staff and their families.”
