Testing has been under strain this week to put it mildly.

We went to a care home at the heart of an area battling a COVID outbreak.

Surely if anyone’s getting tested it’s them? Read on..

Remember routine testing of care home staff was brought in to defend against another devastating wave of deaths among our most elderly and vulnerable.

Staff testing in care homes is particularly critical where there’s an outbreak locally.

They need those results quickly to ensure any asymptomatic staff members who test positive can isolate ASAP.

Regular testing for care home staff was introduced by the Scottish Governnent and then the UK Governnent earlier in the summer after thousands of deaths of care home residents.

In Scotland, routine care home testing is usually processed by the under pressure UK Government testing programme, which has a lab in Glasgow.

This is Grandview House in Grantown-on-Spey in the Highlands.

This is Miller’s Abattoir just down the road, the centre of a local outbreak.

Would the care home be protected from the outbreak here?

Grandview House tested all their staff at the end of August.

The results used to come back in 24-48 hours.

This time the results took *5 days* to come back.

Five days to get test results in a care home amid a local outbreak.

Problem? Yes.

One staff member who shares a household with an abattoir worker came back positive.

The carer and the home were totally in the dark that she’d been carrying the virus and working all along.

The delayed tests meant there was no knowing the Carer was carrying the virus. She was asymptomatic.

She had gone on working in the home with vulnerable residents.

She even took the swab samples for the next batch of staff tests.

Co-owner Libby is concerned that the care home was ‘exposed’.

She says testing staff members is useless if the results take five days when there’s an outbreak locally.

This was the first positive test of any kind at Grandview House who say they’ve assiduously followed public health advice throughout, including during the recent spike in the town.

It appears to be another happy home (seeing the dedication in these places has been one of the more uplifting aspects of reporting the pandemic).

So the care home feared the delayed tests had left them exposed. They were anxious. They conducted a second batch of tests.

This time the results didn’t take five days.

They took six days. And the samples went on something of a journey.

The care home couldn’t understand why the results were taking so long in the middle of an outbreak having had a staff member test positive.

So they chased it up. A Tory MSP made enquiries on their behalf.

Edward Mountain MSP claims @ScotGov intervened and attempted to re-route the care home’s tests from the UK Govt lab to an NHS Highland lab... which wasn’t able to process that type of sample.

So Grandview House was now being discussed in First Minister’s Questions.

Why did @scotgov redirect this care home’s tests to a lab that couldn’t process them?

@nicolasturgeon said she’d look into it.

The test results were eventually returned *six days* later.

Is this any use? Owner Libby: None whatsoever.

In the meantime the care home resorted to using an NHS Highland mobile testing unit that has been sent to the town. That departed on Wednesday.

Grandview House is back to relying on the UK Governnent testing lab.

Which brings us to this box:

Inside are the latest batch of staff tests (from a care home that’s had a staff member test positive, in an area with an outbreak.)

They say *the courier never picked them up.*

This time the results weren’t just delayed. The care home says the samples were never collected in the first place.

Which means they will never be processed. And will have to be destroyed.

Care Home owner Libby says the testing system is not working and it’s time for someone to be held to account.

She says there’s no way care homes can be defended against a second wave with testing as it is.

We have heard concerns over care home testing from other homes too.

Carers are anxious as cases rise and they are desperate to avoid a repeat of the catastrophe earlier in the pandemic.

Department of Health response:

Thanks to super team @luciajwalker and @althomsonC4

DMs open if you have something to share in confidence wherever you are..

The missing tests. The delayed tests. The tests that had to be destroyed.

It’s all here: https://www.channel4.com/news/scottish-care-home-staff-say-they-waited-for-days-for-covid-test-results