Call for local test and trace action in Northumberland amid concerns over 'gaps'

At the authority’s health and wellbeing board meeting on Thursday, August 13, Cllr Susan Dungworth, leader of the opposition Labour group, said: “It’s well-documented that there are issues with the test and trace process and lots of local authorities are setting up their own.

“I wondered if we had any plans to do that, because I am still really concerned that this is the third meeting I have been at where I have been told that there are no testing facilities within Blyth and Ashington, the two poorest communities in Northumberland, and while I’m glad they are going to Morpeth, Hexham and Berwick, those are not the places where data is telling us that people are most at risk of having this disease, passing on this disease and dying from it.

“If we can’t rely on the national system, we need to set up a system ourselves that will protect our residents.”

In response, the county’s director of public health, Liz Morgan, said: “There are two issues there really, there is the issue about access to testing and I think you’re quite right, we need to make sure we can get a mobile testing unit into those areas and that’s the bit of work we’re doing at the moment.

“People can still go online and get a home-testing kit, and if they can get to Newcastle, they can go to the static regional testing unit, which I appreciate for many people won’t be a possibility, but they can still apply online and get a home-testing kit sent to them.”

In relation to contact tracing, she explained that 83% of contacts are followed up in Northumberland ‘by the system in totality’, however, the Public Health England (PHE) regional team managed to follow up 100% of contacts, while the national element of it – the call handlers and central NHS element – only followed up 61%.

Ms Morgan added that following the Government announcement earlier in the week, some of the national resources are to be moved to local authorities or, most likely in the case of the North East, under the umbrella of the PHE regional team.

“So the intention is that we will have a much more localised contact-tracing process in place and we have got a meeting next week, the directors of public health, to look at what a model might look like for the North East.

“What’s important is that whatever local contact-tracing process we have in place, it’s got to be linked to the surveillance system which PHE is using, because the last thing we want is yet another fragmented dataset of cases and contacts to deal with.

“We are working really hard to put something in place for Blyth and we are on the road to having something more localised in place in terms of contact tracing.”

Cllr Dungworth replied that she was still not satisfied, saying: “I don’t want to wait until we are in the position that Bradford and other authorities in Yorkshire and the North West are in, we need to learn about this virus from what happens in other places and act early, not late.

“The fact that there is another meeting next week, that is another week of cross-infection potentially within our communities without the systems in place while we wait for a meeting to discuss how we can set something up.

“We know we have a problem here, please can we act on it now and get those systems in place that don’t rely on people having the means and the wherefore to access testing themselves.”

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