National Testing Programme – School Pilot
Resourcing and workforce management for a school testing pilot
Background
Medacs Healthcare rapidly mobilised a small team of testing staff in record time as part of the Department of Health and Social Care’s national testing pilot in 10 secondary schools. Our project responsibilities were to manage the supply, compliance, rostering and payroll for a team of 15 test workers for one of the school pilot sites in Birmingham.
The staff required included a Testing Quality Supervisor (band 7), a team of Swabbers (band 4), Testing Processors and a Testing Assistant (band 3).
Solution
With less than a week’s notice, our teams secured all the required workers for the school within just four days. We engaged with the local Muslim community to ensure planning was mindful of religious considerations, and successfully onboarded six workers nominated by the local community.
Implementation and resourcing began on the 23 November and all workers were secured and booked onto training by the end of the first week.
Testing in the school commenced early the following week and following the early identification of positive cases, a further two workers were supplied to support wider ‘bubble testing’ and cover extra hours.
Next steps
All 10 school pilots are still ongoing and the outcomes and lessons learned will be used to plan the national rollout of school testing programmes. Our rapid response to resourcing this project effectively demonstrates our ability to implement staffing solutions for testing programmes of all sizes at pace.