CONTRACT TRACING - Private Eye 1521 (8-21 May)
Health secretary Matt Hancock's pledge on 23 April that he would be “really kickstarting contact tracing” by “hiring an initial 18,000 people” and “training up the mass ranks of our contact tracers” sounded like the UK was about to follow the successful test-and-trace route against Covid-19 followed elsewhere. But again the UK seems to be going its own way.
Contact tracing is labour-intensive as it involves interviewing infected people to find their recent contacts, who are then traced and tested for infection and quarantined if necessary. It has helped containment in Germany and some south-east Asian nations. Having abandoned it in favour of its misguided herd immunity plan in mid-March, the government now seems to be trying to play catch-up. But in a letter to the 13 regional directors of public health, Public Health England said only 3,000 of Hancock's 18,000 contact tracers would be “qualified public health and clinical professionals”. The rest will be “call handlers” from “an external logistics partner”.
The NHS will not directly hire those 15,000 people, instead handing out call centre contracts to companies like Serco. Agencies advertising for contact tracer posts are offering minimum wage (£8.72 an hour) and asking for staff with experience of “telephone or face to face customer services” who are “passionate” about “delivering an outstanding customer experience”.
This low-wage “customer services” approach is in contrast to best practice elsewhere, which relies on local government staff. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, the US’s public health association, recommends training “librarians, teachers and school personnel, and other professionals that have experience working in communi ties”. Ireland, meanwhile, brought in repurposed librarians, civil servants and army cadets to supplement its contact-tracing teams.
Public Health England had only 300 contact tracers at the time the approach was abandoned in mid-March, and it didn’t mobilise the 5,000 or so local authority environmental health experts who already have contact-tracing experience. Hancock’s antipathy to local government and enthusiasm for contracting out, as well as for unproven tech solutions - his scheme relies on untested mobile phone apps to trace contacts digitally - means the UK is again out on a limb.
SUNK WITHOUT TRACERS - Private Eye 1522 (22 May - 4th June)
How will the government’s 15,000 unqualified Covid contact tracers (last Eye) be medically supervised? The answer seems to be: via a script.
The 15,000 unqualified staff, supplied by call centres, will join 3,000 medically qualified contact tracers who work for Public Health England. When the Eye asked if the two groups would communicate, the Department of Health (DoH) responded that unqualified staff would receive “context-specific training developed by Public Health England” - but not, apparently, delivered by the NHS or its professionals.
Instead they will rely on a script, with both qualified and unqualified staff working on a common IT system where the DoH said they would “interface and work together in an integrated way where appropriate”. Job ads, however, show that separate, medically unqualified “customer service” supervisors are being recruited for the call centre staff.
Health secretary Matt Hancock’s plan to use unqualified contact tracers unsupervised by medical staff is far from standard practice. Public Health England’s own contact tracing was suspended on 12 March, but its guidance says “a clinician” will speak to infected people to “gather details of places they visited and the people they’ve been in contact with”. In Iceland, health students and police officers supplemented contact tracing teams. Hancock’s plan rests heavily on the idea that its new NHSX app will do the bulk of the tracing work. Let’s hope he’s right.
. I'm really angry with her because she is a mental health nurse working in a clinical setting (so at higher risk imo) and has several chronic health conditions and lives with 3 other people including a child. , so putting them at risk by having my son in her house. My son is putting himself and housemates at risk....although by all accounts his housemates have been bringing back people to hook up with 
. His arguement is 'We are all gonna get it' and understandably he wants to live his life.....however I was just incredulous at his management. Its summer, it's hot, you could of met in the park and socially distanced, you could have had a socially distanced chat on the doorstep. Like him and me do.
