Coronavirus: Contact Tracing

(asked on 17th June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much his Department has spent on NHS Test and Trace staff who are waiting for work.


Answered by
Nadine Dorries Portrait
Nadine Dorries
This question was answered on 2nd July 2020

The Government launched NHS Test and Trace on 28 May 2020. This includes enhanced contact tracing which brings together testing, contact tracing and outbreak management into an end-to-end service.

We have recruited 27,000 contact tracing staff in England to support this service. These staff are a mix of call handlers and health professionals. Final agreed contract values of procuring the call handling service will be published in the individual Contract Award Notices in the Official Journal of the European; and we publish certain information on Contracts Finder about contracts awarded.

These staff are in addition to existing public health experts from Public Health England (PHE) and local government. PHE staff are not employed exclusively as ‘contact tracers’. Contact tracing is undertaken by local health protection teams and the field epidemiology service who are trained in contact tracing and undertake more complex contact tracing work but also carry out other roles.

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