Now Scotland's key workers are set to get on-demand Covid-19 tests following a similar move in England
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First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland is “ready to go live” with coronavirus testing on-demand for key workers, after a similar announcement was made for England-only workers yesterday.
UK health minister Matt Hancock promised that from today key workers would be able to sign themselves up for a Covid-19 test or alternatively their employers could do so but that this would not apply to other parts of the country.
But Ms Sturgeon has now confirmed that Scotland is indeed ready to launch such a system for key workers but there will be a wait after the system offering appointments crashed under the overwhelming demand.
It was revealed this week that a new testing centre is being built at Inverness Campus dedicated to key workers.
She said: “We are ready to go live in Scotland today with the system that the UK government announced yesterday. I understand and it's perhaps not surprising that given the scale of the demand that the digital portal has had some technical difficulties this morning and it is currently not operating as it tries to process that demands
“But we are ready to go live, we are ready to issue guidance about the categories of critical workers that will be able to access testing in this way and guidance to employees about exactly how they can access it.
“There will be different groups, priority groups, health and social care workers in Scotland will continue to be given access to testing in the normal way through health boards at right now.
“The second group will be essential workers in critical national infrastructure which is fundamental for safety and security and lifeline services, there will be a third group directly involved in delivering other essential services
“And a fourth priority group of staff involved in volunteering or nationally or locally significant industry that's important to the economy.
“So we'll be sending out some more guidance on who's included in that and how employers and employees can access that but we will wait until the system itself has stabilized and the current technical difficulties that it is experiencing have been resolved.
“In terms of where that fits into the overall approach to testing this fits in in addition to the processes and systems around testing that are currently operating in Scotland, we have got the target of 3500 capacity of tests by the end of this month and we are working to make sure we are using that full capacity.
“Through extending in some ways the three priority groups we previously set out but also as we look increasingly forward to a test, trace isolate component over of our future strategy how we build the bridge to that.”
