Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 10 June 2020.
Through health protection teams and health boards, care homes will have the resources that they need, whether human resources or resources in the form of testing kits.
I think that the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport has already said publicly this week that she had a conversation—as she does regularly—with health board chief executives on Friday of last week, and no concerns were reported at that time about a lack of resources for testing.
Resources are in place—as kits that are needed for testing, resources to take the samples, and, crucially, the laboratory resources that are needed to process those samples. That is the work that we have been doing in recent weeks, to build up that capacity. The resources are there; it is now a case of making sure that the job is done quickly but in a sustainable way. It is not simply about reporting numbers of test kits that are posted out; it is also about making sure that the tests are done not on a one-off basis but on an on-going basis, week in and week out.