Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether people who have received a negative covid-19 test in a context other than the care home visitor testing programme will be able to use that test result to prove their covid-19 negative status and visit someone who is resident in a care home.

In most circumstances, visitors in tiers 1 to 3 wishing to undertake indoor visiting must have returned a negative test prior to the visit. This test must be taken at the care home and processed by a trained care worker.

Lateral flow devices are being provided for this purpose, where the results are available quickly so that and the visitor will take the test on arrival. Meaningful visits can only take place provided there is a negative test result.

We are providing training to all care homes as part of the rollout of lateral flow tests to process swabs, interpret results and support visitors through the testing process. This is important to reduce the risk of false negatives where a visitor’s test comes back negative when they are actually positive.