Up to 30% of Scotland's covid-19 contact tracers are to be stood down in the coming weeks with the ending of contracts with private companies that have been providing staff.

The Scottish government says there will be a “significant reduction” in private sector involvement in Test and Protect from April as sufficient numbers of NHS staff are available.

New figures suggest 26% of the 3,000 contact tracers currently used by NHS Scotland are from private providers. Around 1,000 are deployed on any one day.

Private firms will still have the opportunity to supply additional call centre workers during peaks in demand.

Serco and Sitel, two firms that have been criticised for their work on England’s test and trace system, have successfully bid to be one of the nine companies on the £60m roster to provide staff to NHS Scotland’s Test & Protect service.

Others include Advice Direct Scotland, go-centric, Customer Experience People Ltd, Journeycall Ltd and HGS UK, which has been criticised for its role running a legal advice helpline in England.

Pursuit Digital Ltd and Ascensos, which both secured deals to provide staff last year, also feature.

The Scottish government says that private firms will only be used to provide “supplementary” staff and inclusion on the shortlist does not guarantee any work.

Figures on workforce numbers were revealed in response to a question from Labour MSP Jackie Bailie, which shows around 3,000 trained tracers were available at the start of March.

Just under half, 1495, were from NHS boards, with the remainder from the National Contact Tracing Centre run by NHS National Services Scotland (NSS).

Slightly less than 800 of the 1571 staff at the National Contract Tracing Centre (NCTC), which supports NHS boards, were supplied by private contractors, representing a quarter of the total.

‘The NCTC contracted with the private sector to provide staff to temporarily augment existing NHS capacity,’ the government’s answer to Ms Baillie states.

‘NSS oversee training and performance of staff to ensure quality is maintained. External partners currently account for less than 30% of the trained contact tracing workforce and are deployed as required.

‘The significant majority of contact tracing staff on any given day are NHS employees. All contact tracing in Scotland is, and will remain NHS led.’

Involvement of outside firms in NHS Scotland’s contact tracing has proved controversial, with Nicola Sturgeon stressing involvement has been at the margins and does not represent outsourcing of the kind seen south of the border.

At the start of the pandemic the UK government signed initial contracts worth up £720m with Serco and Sitel to provide 18,000 tracers in England but there has been criticism from the official UK watchdog over the number of people successfully traced.

A December 2020 report by the National Audit Office found just 60% of contacts were reached by this part of the service in the last week of October, down from 91% at the end of May.

The watchdog said the level of private sector involvement in the tracing part of the service was “unusual” by international standards.

Nicola Sturgeon rejected any parallels between the two approaches last week:

“What Test and Protect does, the purpose of it and the fundamentals of how it works, are very similar to Test and Trace in England.

“But we built Test and Protect effectively from the bottom up, from our pre-existing very localised public health teams and the much more limited contact tracing capability that we had in place.

“We didn’t build the whole brand-new almost sitting-outside-the-NHS system that has been done in England.”

When healthandcare.scot reported last year that Test & Protect was sourcing staff from a call centre firm, Nicola Sturgeon said the £1m contract represented a “small number on a short-term basis”.

A separate £10m deal for 350 staff emerged a month later, prompting a Scottish government spokesperson to say: “All contact tracing in Scotland is, and will remain, NHS-led and in no reasonable circumstance could this be considered outsourcing.”

While the use of external contractors will be stepped down at the end of this month, private companies will continue to have the opportunity to provide staff during busy periods.

A framework agreement – which involves buying services from pre-agreed suppliers without the need for a full tender process – will be used.

The notice for the £60m contract for additional call centre service capacity, which was published in December 2020, says there will be an ‘on-going medium-term requirement for these services, not only for covid-19 but potentially for other services.’

The nine companies were then announced as successful bidders to the framework in February, following an open tender process.

Inclusion on the framework does not guarantee work and supplies will be subject to further evaluations for each call centre requirement, healthandcare.scot understands.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “Our Test and Protect programme led by NHS Scotland is overwhelmingly staffed by substantive NHS personnel and provides a high-quality, value for money service without relying on expensive contractors and temporary staff.

“Over 80% of Contact Tracers in Scotland are NHS employees. The majority are embedded within Territorial Health Boards and wider Health Protection functions and are able to use local expertise to best respond to outbreaks.

“While NHS staff remain at the heart of the operation, private sector companies can provide supplementary resource to ensure that spikes in demand for contact tracing can be met. Appropriate limited use of external resource enables us to deliver a complex and critical service, at a rapid pace, amid a global pandemic.”

Read more: FM: Scottish & English testing regimes very different; Call centre firm brought in to bolster Test & Protect; Private firm awarded £10m Test and Protect contract

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