Hot on the heels of zero-hours contracts being issued in error, the curse of the newly recruited contact tracer strikes again. The contract debacle has passed; it was a mistake by the recruitment agency the HSE said. Now, it has emerged that the latest contact tracer recruits were asked to supply their own laptops.
The Irish Times reports that according to a list of guidelines issued to the new recruits, they would be shadowing experienced contact tracers for a period. The recruits were asked to "bring your laptop if you have one. You might not need one while shadowing, but will need one for work as we are still awaiting laptops."
A HSE spokesperson said " A small number of contact tracer recruits were asked to bring their own laptops to training in one of our centres. Due to the large number of new recruits, 270 by last Friday, a small number of new laptops are not available yet. This cohort of trainee contact tracers will not be accessing the Covid Care Tracker live system until they are in possession of a work laptop. The Covid Care Tracker is Microsoft Cloud system on a secure server and cannot be accessed by external devices. All new contact tracers will have a work laptop before they are rostered on to begin contact tracing."
Due to the steady increase in test requests and positive case rate the contact tracing system has been put under extra pressure in recent weeks. The HSE said that it is meeting its target of turning around positive cases with full contact tracing within the target of 3 days in 90% of cases.
The HSE was forced, due to the pressure it was under, to ask 2000 Covid positive people to do their own contact tracing recently. The HSE hopes that this new batch of recruits will ensure that this won't happen again.
