NHS Test and Trace is a key weapon in the fight against coronavirus and the fight to protect our economy. It has to succeed. We all have a contribution to make to ensure that success.

The service has had a difficult birth, but much good progress has been made. NHS Test and Trace’s most difficult test is likely to be this winter.

As this long read has highlighted, there is a huge amount to be delivered across a wide range of areas for the service to be fit and ready for winter, including:

  • providing a more regularly updated strategic roadmap of how the service will develop and a broader range of regularly published measures of success
  • ensuring, before winter arrives, a settled balance between national and local control with more emphasis on greater local control
  • a quadrupling in testing capacity and robust, advanced plans, approaches in the event of test supply / demand mismatch
  • a massive expansion in testing access to enable people who need a test to access them closer to where they live and work
  • a significant increase in the speed and consistency of test turnaround times
  • an effective, more strategic and long term, approach to prioritising who can access tests
  • a clear forward plan on regular testing of NHS staff
  • improvement in performance across all the different stages of the end to end contact tracing process
  • improving performance of the system in harder to reach communities
  • improving data flows
  • successfully deploying new testing approaches
  • maximising public confidence in the service

 
This is, clearly, a wide agenda of activity to deliver in a short period of time.