Please can you provide communication between yourselves and Welsh government and also yourselves and ThermoFisher relating to advice on the use of Covid testing swabs provided by the distributor? I refer to the COPAN swabs reported on by Wales Online in January 2021 which were faulty and produced false positive test results.
Please can you also now confirm the exact number of faulty swabs that were involved?
Thank you for your recent request dated 5 April 2022.
We have undertaken a preliminary review of this FOI and there are significant challenges in providing the information. The event was significant and whilst immediate action was taken, the response and investigation work lasted several weeks. It involved a large volume of communication consisting of emails alongside formal and informal engagement with clinical and laboratory teams across NHS Wales.
I estimate that it is very likely that it will cost more than the appropriate limit set out in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to answer your request. The appropriate limit specified for a public authority is £450. This represents the estimated cost of it taking over 18 hours to determine whether we hold the information and to locate, retrieve and extract it.
In order to provide you with the information that you have requested would require significant dedicated time to find and extract the information given the wide scope of the request. It would take a number of searches through all communications between identified parties to identify which contain the information you are seeking.
Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act we are not obliged to comply with a request for information if we estimate that the cost of complying with the request would exceed £450. Therefore this is a formal refusal notice under Section 17[5] of the Act.
You may wish to refine your request by narrowing its scope by being more specific about what information you particularly wish to obtain, including any dates or period of time relevant to the information required.
If you are unhappy with the service you have received in relation to your request and wish to make a complaint or request a review of the decision, you should write to the Corporate Complaints Manager, Public Health Wales NHS Trust, 3, Number 2, Capital Quarter, Tyndall Street, Cardiff, CF10 4BZ.
If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint or review, you may apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally, the ICO cannot make a decision unless you have exhausted the complaints procedure provided by the Trust. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:
Information Commissioner for Wales
2nd Floor
Churchill House
Churchill Way
Cardiff
CF10 2HH
Telephone: 029 2067 8400
Email: wales@ico.org.uk