“On January 17, as the nation recorded another 39,000 cases of the disease, with hundreds of thousands of active cases, the first phase of the “transitioning to Living with Covid” plan went live at the national hotline…..Health Minister Greg Hunt first announced what was then an information line for people worried about the novel coronavirus on January 31, 2020. Although hosted by healthdirect – a sort of national cabinet for government health advice across every jurisdiction in Australia – the call centres were set up by Stellar Asia Pacific Pty Ltd, now a wholly owned subsidiary of its former rival Probe Group.” [Journalist & author Rick Morton writing in in The Saturday Paper, 5 February 2022]
The Saturday Paper, 5 February 2022:
The centrepiece of the federal government’s “Living with Covid” program is a call centre outsourced to former robo-debt collectors and staffed by workers on casual contracts with no medical experience.
A cache of documents and testimony obtained by The Saturday Paper reveals the inner workings of the National Coronavirus Helpline, which is being run by private-equity owned Probe Group and its subsidiaries on contracts worth more than $270 million.
This information hotline has now been asked to triage people who have tested positive for Covid-19, or who believe they are infected, as part of the Commonwealth’s pivot to managing the disease in the community.
In practice, it has outsourced a key front-line health service to a small battalion of low-paid, poorly trained workers on insecure contracts. People staffing the hotline do not have medical qualifications. Many were previously unemployed and subject to the welfare system’s “mutual obligations”, which threatens penalties and payment suspensions if they refuse reasonable offers of work.
Training offered to new Probe recruits lasts only two hours.
Accounts obtained by The Saturday Paper show workers have described being placed under extreme stress while managing an overwhelming variety of callers, with limited information or ability to actually help them.
For instance, the coronavirus helpline is listed as the No. 1 point of contact on almost every government department, including Home Affairs and for disability and Aboriginal health services, despite there being no specific resources for team members to even provide advice.
Although scripts for call centre operators advise patients to seek rapid antigen tests if they are available, it is not part of the helpline’s remit to actually provide these tests or information on where they might be obtained.
Helpline workers are also fielding calls from people who are experiencing family violence, poverty or other types of extreme stress and are expected to arrange welfare checks or talk them through complex problems with little support.
Where problems do arise, employees are encouraged to phone their team leaders and not put anything in writing to ensure a “quick response”. Employees have requested access to more resources and training but in some cases have had no response from management or, where concerns have been heard, a two-page “cheat sheet” is provided.
There have been frequent occurrences of callers who have been given incorrect isolation advice from the National Coronavirus Helpline or who have complained about misleading public statements by politicians compared with the advice for different jurisdictions offered by the hotline.
In other cases, callers have been directed to see a doctor but have been sent away from GP clinics and even emergency departments, contrary to the advice offered over the helpline…..
Read the full article here.
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