Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the programme of testing for covid-19 in care homes.
Protecting care home residents and staff has been one of our top priorities and this includes increasing access to testing. We have now sent out over 12 million test kits to care homes. We are continuing to prioritise Care Home Testing, where we are issuing more than 120,000 tests a day to care homes across the country. We have met our 7 September target of providing testing kits to all care homes for older people and people with dementia who have registered for regular retesting kits. In addition, all other care homes have been able to place orders for test kits from 31 August. Since they were eligible to apply for regular repeat testing on the 31st August, over 5000 specialist homes in England have applied for tests. Where an outbreak has been identified, we test all staff and residents as a priority, with all those who test negative being tested again 4-7 days later.