We have front line staff working in disablement services. They have clinics booked over several weeks which would need cancelling if we had a clinical member of staff with symptoms. This would put vinerable patients at risk, also we would need to cancell clinics providing a critical servce. Thats why we are looking to see if there are any reliable testing programmes out there.

Who will do the testing and who will interpret the results?  Are you or anyone in your organisation qualified to do this? Do they work to an approved standard using validated methods?

If not then its waste of time and money.

Try you local Occupational Health Service - many are qualified and carry out this service using the Antigen kits.  We have paid £60 per test which gave us instant results as to whether they have developed COVID antibodies during the last 6 weeks or whether they are developing them

Edited by user 27 September 2020 10:16:04(UTC)  | Reason: addition information

Possibly exposing many to unecessary restriction as The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-Isolation) (England) Regulations 2020 do not define what a "test" is only referring to a positive test result.

Under the Coronavirus Act an infected person excludes someone who “who have been infected but are clear of coronavirus (unless re-infected)” So any test must distinguish between the two.

The whole system is based around medical professionals identifying the disease and then deciding what action to take. Under the Public Health Act if a medical professional ie a doctor believes, based their professional understanding, that a person has a notifiable disease eg covid 19. They must report this immediately to the local public health officer. The rules specifically state that the medical professionals should not wait for any confirmatory laboratory test.

Testing should be carried out in accredited diagnostic laboratories using established methods and in the case of kits they need to be approved by the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. As far as the system goes nothing else counts.