Until last week, the workers at the call centre were doing the simplest job in the tracing chain, calling those who have been identified as contacts of infected people and telling them to isolate themselves for 14 days, giving them some scripted advice and collecting a small amount of data. But last week, the call centre announced that all the workers on this contract were being “upskilled”. Instead of making these simple calls, they would now be calling infected patients and discovering all their contacts over the past fortnight. To use the official terms, they have suddenly been promoted from level 3 call handlers to level 2 clinical contact caseworkers.
In its
advertisements for this job, the NHS explains applicants must be at Clinician Band 6 level, who will be working as part of a team of “experienced clinicians”. You must have a health or science degree or “demonstrable equivalent experience or qualifications”; experience in “a field related to public health or health and social care services as a practitioner” and “registration with the relevant professional body”. Among your tasks are “conducting a public health risk assessment”, “providing public health advice” and “using your clinical knowledge to help escalate complex cases”. Anyone accepted for this role would be “provided with appropriate training”.
But the workers at the call centre who have been “upskilled” to this level are mostly school-leavers and students, with no relevant qualifications. While the job is officially advertised at between £16.97 and £27.15 per hour, they are all being paid the minimum wage, which means £6.45 for the 18- to 20-year-olds (most of them) and £8.72 for over-25s.
