– in the Scottish Parliament at on 10 September 2020.
Edward Mountain
Conservative
The First Minister will be aware that 37 people in Grantown-on-Spey have tested positive for Covid-19, including a care home worker. At the outset, given the concerns of staff and residents, and at their request, I contacted the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, and she confirmed that the tests that are carried out in that care home are being diverted to Raigmore hospital for analysis.
However, NHS Highland’s director of public health confirmed that NHS Highland could not analyse the type of tests that had been diverted to it. I ask the First Minister to explain why the Scottish Government diverted tests to a lab that could not analyse them and, indeed, subsequently lost them, which meant that complete retesting was required and led to subsequent delays.
Will the First Minister please give me an undertaking that she will personally investigate the situation? The issues that have arisen do not give me or the residents of Grantown the confidence in the test and protect system that we should have, especially given that, this morning, NHS Highland not only dispatched incomplete testing kits to the care home but required care home staff to go back to Raigmore to pick up more.
Nicola Sturgeon
Scottish National Party
I will certainly have the health secretary look into the specific issues that have arisen. I am not aware of the particular problems around testing, but I know that the local teams in Grantown-on-Spey have been working very hard and, I think, very effectively to make sure that the cluster of cases in question is kept under control.
The most recent information that I had was that the cluster consisted of 37 cases, most of which are linked to the local abattoir; there are just two cases in the wider community. I do not dismiss the challenges that Edward Mountain has raised, which we will look into, but those figures are a real tribute to test and protect—they show that it has stopped a workplace cluster seeping into the wider community. I thank everybody who has helped to achieve that so far.
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It is chaired by the prime minister.
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