The Scottish government is planning to pay firms up to £60m over the next two years to provide ‘additional call centre capacity’ for NHS Scotland, healthandcare.scot can reveal.

There will be an ‘on-going medium-term requirement for these services, not only for covid-19 but potentially for other services’, a new contract notice states.

Up to eight firms will be awarded work under a process accelerated due to the pandemic.

It follows news that private companies were supplying staff to NHS Test & Protect, Scotland’s contact tracing system.

healthandcare.scot reported last month that Pursuit digital had been awarded a £10m contract to provide staff to the national contact tracing centre.

Earlier it was revealed that Motherwell call centre group Ascensos was supplying contact tracers to the NHS at a cost of £1.3m.

Pushing back against claims the service was being outsourced, the First Minister said the deal involved a “small number [of staff] on a short-term basis.”

Ascensos provided fewer than 100 staff, Ms Sturgeon said. However, the agreement with Pursuit Digital was for up to 350 workers daily.

When Nicola Sturgeon announced the test and trace system in May she pledged “all the work of identifying and tracing contacts will be done within Scotland’s NHS.”

The Scottish government turned to external support after health service staff who were working as contact tracers returned to their original roles when the NHS began to restart services that had been paused.

Referring to the contract with Pursuit, a government spokeswoman insisted that “all contact tracing in Scotland is, and will remain, NHS-led and in no reasonable circumstance could this be considered outsourcing.

She added: “This additional resource does not replace our NHS-led service.”

At the time, opposition politicians accused Ministers of not being transparent about the agreements.

Scottish Conservative health spokesman Donald Cameron MSP said: “The problem isn’t using private firms to help with test and protect.

“It’s the failure of ministers to be honest and say they’ve failed with their pledge to recruit 2,000 contact tracers by June and have had to ask for more help.

“There’s far less shame in doing that than in failing to be open and transparent with information, a practice which is becoming all too commonplace under this administration.”

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