Contact tracers’ expertise is being ignored | Letters

The system is inefficient and wasteful, writes a contact worker. Local authority initiatives are doing better, says Austen Lynch

I am a clinical contact worker for test and trace. Dr David Maisey (Letters, 1 November) should realise that the clinical level (tier 2) of contact tracers - those who call the cases themselves - has been made up of clinical staff at a band 6 level or higher since the beginning, with GPs welcome to join. We have a wealth of clinical experience. The strict instructions to adhere to scripts and policies mean we are not allowed to use it. It's only recently that the call handler level employees were moved up. This is exploitative and stressful for them and dismissive of those of us with clinical training.

Clinical staff have been highlighting from the beginning that there is a problem with families getting too many phone calls. Last week, we received another email from above reminding us that we must follow the policy and get names and numbers for every member of a household until such time as Public Health England/the government change the policy. This is due to limitations in the computer program and, no doubt, to do with the initial privacy concerns, so that no record is matched up with another record.