Agenda item

Fiona Phillips updated the Board on the work that had been progressed regarding contact tracing in complex settings.  If it was a complex scenario, the Public Health England (PHE) Public Protection Team would pick it up and would potentially work with the local Public Health Team if any local work needed to be carried out.  Three visits to premises with concerning outbreaks in York had been carried out by a representative from both the Public Protection Team and the Public Health Team.

A lot of work had be completed with schools to trace the contacts of cases.  However, Fiona noted that the head teachers within the schools and the respective role in universities had done a lot of work on this, almost becoming experts themselves.

The first preparatory meeting with PHE had taken place on 1 October and in just three weeks the local contact tracing system had been fully set up.  Existing staff members from the Health Trainer Team had been used in the interim while Health Promotion Officers were being recruited and trained.  After they were fully trained, the Health Trainers would only be used in a surge capacity if they were needed.  Fiona stated that this was important as the service needed to be reactive and able to be scaled up when appropriate.

Currently, the National Track and Trace Service attempted to contact cases/contacts for 48 hours and if this hadn’t been achieved it would be passed over to us.  Our local system  would then try to contact the person for a 24 hour period.  If contact could not be made, a visit to their home address would be organised to offer support in person.

Councillor Myers asked about the consistency of funding regarding the local test and trace system.  Sharon stated that all local authorities received a share of the one-off grant of £300m that was allocated to local authorities’ Public Health Teams.  York’s share of that was £173,000, which had been used to support the communications work as well as to boost the capacity of both the Public Protection Team and Business Intelligence Team.  Money from the existing Public Health grant had also been used to supplement the funding.  Through being prudent, the funds were expected to allow the service to run up until December 2021.  If the pandemic continued further funding would have to be requested. The Chair added that a letter had been sent to the Health Secretary which called for additional funding and support for the test and trace system as well as for a second walk-in testing site.  Ian Floyd, Interim Head of Paid Service at City of York Council, stated that we shouldn’t forget that other funding was still being received with all other local authorities suffering from the same financial pressures.  However it clearly made sense that the return of investment in covid will be massive for businesses and residents.

The Board noted the report and expressed their thanks to the Public Health Team for establishing the local contact tracing system.