Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to help ensure that health and social care staff continue to have access to free covid-19 testing.

From 1 April 2023, the Government implemented changes to COVID-19 testing. These changes aligned COVID-19 more closely with the management of other respiratory infections. As part of this change, routine symptomatic testing of staff in high-risk settings ended. Staff testing has continued in a limited number of the most high-risk settings to protect particularly vulnerable people. This includes hospice staff with symptoms and some National Health Service staff with symptoms, working on inpatient wards with severely immunosuppressed patients. Information on testing in these settings is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/covid-19-testing-during-periods-of-low-prevalence