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Covid-19 Tests

Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 3 March 2021

Wednesday, 3 March 2021

Questions (924)

Neale Richmond

Question:

924. Deputy Neale Richmond asked the Minister for Health if he has considered increasing investment in test and trace facilities to help combat Covid-19; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11792/21]

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Written answers

The HSE has worked intensively to put in place a comprehensive, reliable and responsive testing and tracing operation which has seen the completion of over 3.5 million tests for Covid-19 to date. The median time for community referral to appointment is less than 5 hours with almost 91% of GP referrals provided with a COVID-19 test appointment within 24 hours. Serial testing programmes continue in Residential Care Facilities and in food production facilities.

Contact tracing is also an important part of the HSE’s response to Covid-19 and the HSE has implemented improvements to the efficiency and effectiveness of the service including enhancements to ensure sufficient surge capacity. This involved a number of automation processes being put in place including the issuing of text messages to relay test results in order to decrease turnaround times. The Contact Tracing Centres are operating 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and are fully rostered every day.

Recruitment of staff to support swabbing activity and contact tracing activity is a significant part of the improvements underway to ensure that a dedicated staff is available to respond to the pandemic. As of the 23rd of February, a total of 752 swabbers have been hired and placed to support swabbing activity along with a total of 900 staff supporting contact tracing.

The recently published HSE National Service Plan 2021 clearly demonstrates the significant investment that the Government has provided to ensure end-to-end COVID-19 testing and contact tracing is designed and delivered in a manner to protect the health of people living in Ireland from the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As described in the Service Plan, the HSE is committed to, among other improvements:

- ensuring the required workforce, infrastructure and service enhancements are in place,

- implement a sustainable, flexible and trained testing and tracing workforce

- continue to implement a permanent and flexible community test centre infrastructure with dedicated test centres nationwide and pop-up fleets deployed as necessary

- provide support for dedicated community laboratory capacity and infrastructure

- enhance the acute laboratory workforce and equipment to support additional testing capacity

- continue to develop and enhance the COVID-19 Care Tracker ICT system.

Testing and contact tracing continues to be a key component of the Government’s and the country’s response to the pandemic. Ireland will continue to pursue a robust testing strategy under the guidance of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) and operationalised by the HSE. On an ongoing basis, NPHET considers and reviews, based on public health risk assessments, how best to target testing to detect, and mitigate the impact of, the virus across the population. This includes keeping Ireland’s national testing policy under continuing review.

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