I had a conference call with Seb James, Chief Executive of Boots UK and Republic of Ireland, and Tricia Kennerley, Director International Public Affairs, who are based at Boots in Beeston. Part of the huge Boots site is in our Broxtowe constituency and many people who work there live in Broxtowe too.
SEE VIDEO OF OUR CONVERSATION BY CLICKING HERE
Boots was the first non-hospital COVID-19 testing facility in the UK. Antigen testing is most useful for key workers, for example the NHS, Police, Fire Service etc. It allows for people to establish rapidly whether someone who needs to be at work can or whether they must stay at home. It means people do not need to wait for symptoms to develop as an indicator of whether they must stay at home. A swab is taken deep inside the mouth by a medically competent individual. The swabs are then sent for testing overnight, a machine can typically test 90 samples in 40 minutes. Once a positive or negative result has come back, the information must then be processed and logged. Doing this allows for the disease to be tracked. Testing takes place in car parks with the following procedure:
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Step 1. People invited for testing drive into the car park and roll down their windows when they reach a testing booth.
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Step 2. Medically trained individuals dressed in full protective clothing take a swab of the mouth and take the sample away for testing.
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Step 3. The swab is tested and results are typically returned the next day.
Boots is supporting the Government and the NHS to set up and resource drive-through testing centres. So far, 341 Boots colleagues have tested 106,000 people, including NHS workers and frontline staff across our 28 COVID-19 testing centres which is referenced by Seb in the video here.
Military personnel are now being drafted in and trained to increase testing capacity further. The military is carrying out mobile testing which allows them to test more remote facilities like care homes located away from fixed location testing facilities.