Walk-in testing centres set to target regional locations as capacity rises
New walk-in centres will be opened in rural and more remote areas of the country in a bid to improve accessibility to Covid-19 testing across Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has announced.
The move aims to improve accessibility to testing for areas which do not have easy access to regional testing centres or where it has proven difficult sending home testing kits.
Capacity will be increased country-wide to help battle the capacity issues experienced by the system over the weekend, the First Minister confirmed yesterday.
Eleven new walk-through testing centres will be opened in total in a bid to improve access to Covid-19 tests and stop people being directed to testing centres in England.
The first of these will be set up in the Victor y Memorial Hall in St Andrews, Fife. In addition, three new mobile testing centres will be set up in the Central Belt, with one opening in Glasgow later today.
Together the new centres aim to increase testing capacity by around 4,500 tests per day.
The First Minister said the final locations of the other ten walk-through centres were in the process of being finalised and would prioritise areas in Scotland that struggled with accessibility to testing at the moment and would also be based on demand.
Ms Sturgeon, speaking at her daily coronavirus briefing, also moved to reassure people worried that walkthrough centres would lead to an increased risk of infection.
She said: “That is one of the issues that is being looked at very closely in terms of the planning for walk-through centres and they will be designed in a way to minimise and mitigate that, but that’s why we have perhaps taken a bit longer to get to establishing walk-through centres to make sure all of these issues are taken account of.
“We are still process of deciding the location of these and part of what we will be looking at is patterns of demand and also local accessibility.
“The first one is in St Andrews and obviously St Andrews is a university town as well, so that is another reason why that is an appropriate location.
“We’ll be looking carefully at parts of Scotland where the distance to regional centres may be longer, where it is maybe more difficult to get home testing kits quickly to people, but also we will be looking closely at where the patterns of demand suggest these locations should be.”
Interim chief medical officer Gregor Smith said infection control at the centres had been “carefully thought through”. He said there would be no increased risk of people being unknowingly infected by those presenting for testing.
Dr Smith said: “Accessibility is one of the core components of why these walk-in centres are being developed and particularly for communities who don’t have ready access to vehicles that can take them to one of the regional centres, we wanted to make sure that they were able to access testing safely, appropriately and quickly when that was needed as well.
“These centres will be located in areas where that requirement has been identified.”
Over the weekend there were rep or ts an increase in the number of school-age pupils reporting symptoms of Covid-19 had led to an “exceptional” spike in the number of requests for tests.
Many people who were looking to book a test were offered them outside of Scotland, with the First Minister saying “constraints” on the booking system had also led to a surge of calls to the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 helpline.
Ms Sturgeon said tech nic al issues such as the ones described “should not be happening” and were in the process of being fixed “as quickly as possible”.
She gave the pledge as she yesterday confirmed a rise of 44 people testing positive, taking the Scottish total to 19,921.