Bigwoolley My "expertise" on the testing debacle may be second hand but it is a very close second hand discussed with me daily from first hand expertise involved in a public sector testing initiative, and I have also heard first hand from the Scientists, and managers who worked for companies like ICI, who volunteered for the superlabs what a mess it all was, unsafe, their expertise ignored. In one case a manager who was actually desperate for a job to pay the mortgage and his children's grant top ups, walked out of the building because he had witnessed unsafe practises that would never have been tolerated in the Chemical companies he had worked for previously.
For instance the Scientists who volunteered were flagging that the superlabs needed specialists in to develop the data systems and their interface with the NHS systems. They may have been experts in the use of PCR machines but the research they use them for generates big data and they know where to access the expertise to manage it. In fact data management is one of the biggest challenges for genetics research. The Superlabs Managers went instead with loading results into Excel. Anyone who has ever had to manage large amounts of data for any purpose knows that is an astonishingly bad decision. Excel is for small amounts of information. Not only that but they didn't bother to find out the fields it has available for data so they carried on inputting data after it was full. The loss of data that made the news was inevitable as a result of that decision, taken despite advice that it was wrong and they needed to get expert advice. Are you really saying that the people who went with that really astonishingly bad decision had sufficient expertise? As one put it "They made you feel like you were a nuisance. It was like go away little girl, don't bother your little Head about it, just get on with the PCR reading". This wasn't an ancillary task, getting the data to the NHS and to Track and Trace was vital for patient safety and treatment and for tracing contacts of cases, it was a core activity and one the public sector labs had already developed the effective systems for. Tracing tens of thousands of contacts just as the second wave took off was delayed. And this was October, not in the white heat of the initial set up. They had had months to address the issue properly.
Our Scientists really are extremely frustrated. You only have to read the minutes of independent SAGE, or the evidence given to the All Party Parliamentary Committee on Covid.
And my business expertise is from a forty year career in business to Director level involved in Corporate Planning for a FTSE company so yes I can absolutely say that Business Plans should, and do, identify and assess the probability of risks, which a second wave and mutations of the virus were, and plan for them. How can you deliver a mission if you don't plan to minimise the risks? There should have been plans in place to increase capacity. Business Planning is an iterative up and down process that should be live all the time, constantly evolving. Everyone who fed into the plan right up to the leader who signs it off is responsible for it as an effective means to deliver an organisations mission, and the buck definitely stops at Dido. However crap she is it is most definitely her job to ensure it is fit for purpose.