More resources are needed to strengthen our successful model

摘要

With Blackburn with Darwen's diverse communities experiencing lockdown and special measures for longer than almost any other area in the country, creating an effective test and trace system has been at the heart of our public health response. Breaking the chains of transmission, especially through familial and social contacts is key to stopping the spread of coronavirus. It was clear from early on that the national system was neither robust nor timely and was failing our residents. Keen to increase the number of successful contacts and reduce the time to do so we worked closely with Public Health England (PHE) and the national NHS Test and Trace team to set up a local enhanced contact tracing service, going live in July, just two months after the national service started. Attendance on PHE's two-day national training programme helped us to understand the national system's digital platform (CTAS). In-house business analysts customised this training, cascaded it to our local contact tracing team and designed a lean end to end process; this learning has been shared with other local authorities to support development of their own systems.