News

16 April, 2020

Health Technology Wales joins key Welsh Government groups responding to COVID-19

We’ve joined a Welsh Government led consortium of stakeholders to deliver the national plan for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing.

This consortium includes Public Health Wales, health boards, Shared Services Partnership, NHS Wales Informatics Service, Life Sciences Hub, Genomics Partnership Wales and academic partners.

Testing is a vital part of how we are working to protect the public, optimise the outcomes for our patients and keep essential services running in Wales. The national plan for COVID-19 testing has two key objectives;

  • to reduce the harm caused by COVID-19
  • to help the public and professionals get back to their normal daily lives.

The Welsh national COVID-19 test approach works alongside the UK Testing Strategy.

We’ve asked the testing group to identify priority COVID-19 related technology topics that require rapid turnaround. We’re producing Topic Exploration Reports (TERs) for these technologies. TERs are used to understand the base of evidence behind a technology and enable evidence-based decision making.

Several COVID-19 related TERs have already been published on our website, including;

We’re also a part of the Welsh Government’s COVID-19 Research Cell that is sharing intelligence and coordinating connections into UK wide processes for research. Our work is focusing on synthesising the emerging evidence for COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics, including a regularly updated COVID-19 evidence digest.

Visit www.healthtechnology.wales/covid-19 for more information on the research services we’re providing to our partners in health and social care.