Community Testing: Lateral Flow Device (LFD) Testing

Concepts

• community testing
• truro
• miscellaneous health services
• cornwall
• urgent covid-19 response requirement
• lateral flow device
• number of testing centres
• testing services
• lfd tests
• testing

Location

Truro

Description

Urgent Covid-19 response requirement for community testing to conduct Lateral Flow Device (LFD) testing services at a number of testing centres across Cornwall in order to allow businesses to book LFD tests for their employees.

Award Detail

Award Criteria

CPV Codes

• 85140000 - Miscellaneous health services

Indicators

• Award on basis of price and quality.

Legal Justification

1) There are genuine reasons for treating this contract with extreme urgency. The Government asked local authorities to provide a testing service for people who have to go to work during the current lockdown. 2) The events that have led to the need for extreme urgency were unforeseeable. The need for large scale LFD testing could not have been predicted as it relates mainly to the increased infectivity of the new variant of Coronavirus. 3) It is impossible to comply with the usual timescales in the PCRs. The Council could conduct an accelerated procurement under the open procedure (15 days). Standard procedure with accelerated timescales of 15 days could have a significant impact on Covid transmission and also business continuity at this difficult phase in the pandemic. The programme is due to run until 31st March (but may be extended). Therefore 15 days is a significant proportion of the programme timescale. 4) The situation is not attributable to the contracting authority. Previously community testing (known as DPH led testing) was only available to LAs in Tier 3 and above restriction levels so not available to Cornwall. Most learning has come from urban models such as Liverpool. Therefore, we have no local experience and very little experience from rural areas to draw on. Since the announcement on 10th January we have been developing a workplace based model that will be run using Council staff working with local businesses to set up their own programme. This is because the need to travel to a community testing site twice weekly for testing will be considerable barrier to taking part in this scheme for many workers in our rural county. It was previously proposed that home based testing would be authorised by MHRA and previous communication from DHSC suggested this may be from 18th January. On this basis we also worked up a home testing proposal with Devon and Cornwall Police but we have now been informed that home based testing will not be authorised for this programme. On January 18th the Government announced asymptomatic testing for primary schools and nurseries. On January 21st it was confirmed that private, voluntary and independent providers would not be included and there was an expectation that these settings and childminders would be covered by LA community testing programmes. At this point the delivery model had to be revised to include some community testing sites as workplace based testing could not cover this cohort.