Telford's Covid testing praised amid calls for more certainty on funding
New coronavirus variants and uncertainty around funding to deal with the future of the pandemic are two major risks identified in a public health report.
The Department of Health and Social Care has asked councils to refresh their Local Outbreak Management Plans during March and give feedback on strengths and dangers in their areas.
Public Health Consultant Helen Onions praises Telford and Wrekin’s “top-performing” vaccination programme and “better-than-average” test provision, but says temporary government finance sources need to be consolidated so councils can plan “with more certainty and flexibility”.
In her report for the borough’s Health and Wellbeing Board she says the council has surge testing plans to identify and track new “variants of concern”, but laboratory time and space will be needed for this.
Public Health Director Liz Noakes and Health Protection, Health, Wellbeing and Commissioning chief Nicky Minshall will present Ms Onions’s report and the refreshed plan to the board on Thursday.
“During the past nine months the Telford and Wrekin Local Outbreak Plan implementation has demonstrated that a strong locally-led system has been best placed to prevent and reduce transmission of the coronavirus,” Ms Onions writes.
Examples of good practice in the borough, she adds, include “better-than-average access to symptomatic and asymptomatic testing” which has “evoked a testing culture with consistently high testing rates, including advice to seek precautionary testing”.
The borough also had the “top-performing vaccination programme in the country”, including council support for the mass vaccination centre at Telford’s International Centre and a “system-wide inequalities plan to reduce vaccine hesitancy and improve uptake”, she says.
Ms Onions lists “funding” and “variants of concern” as risks, writing: “There is a need to consolidate the various sources to temporary funding to enable local authorities to plan with more certainty and flexibility over the medium to long term.
“Dealing with multiple virulent variants will be a challenge but the authority has a council-wide operational plan to undertake surge testing.
“There is a need, however, to ensure this is deployed using a public health risk-assessed approach and with sufficient laboratory capacity to undertake timely sequencing of samples.”
Ms Onions’s report says the Telford and Wrekin Protection Hub has 50 council staff who have been trained to cope with surge phases.
“This was operationalised, for example, in January and February 2021 during the period of peak infection rates.”
