FRANCIS CAROLL TALKS TO LOUTH COUNTY COUNCIL STAFF ABOUTTHEIR
COUNCIL RESPONSE TO COVID-19 IS TWO PART CHALLENGE
WHILE our healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, carers and ambulance staff have been on the frontline in the battle against COVID-19, the staff in county councils right across the country have been on the frontline of the community response to the pandemic.
Louth County Council (LCC) along with councils right across the country have responded with Community Call, a call centre response team instigated by the Government to assist those in the local community who may require assistance with shopping, transit to medical appointments or just the need to hear a friendly voice.
To date Louth County Council have taken over 500 calls from those in the community who have contacted Community Call looking for that assistance.
‘In Louth I would say more than 70% of our calls are about collecting medicine and doing shopping, in other counties, it’s more contact from people who are lonely and feeling the effects of social isolation’, explained Chief Executive, Joan Martin.
‘All of these problems or anything and everything can be brought to our door with the call centre’.
Following the Taoiseach’s announcement of restrictions, County Council’s were tasked with setting up Community Call to support those who may need assistance.
‘We were being asked to put that into place over that weekend, so during that weekend we were to have held the first meeting of the forum, that was to be chaired by the chief executive’.
‘So we had to set up those over Saturday and Sunday to try and gather all the people around us, all the different agencies, people like the GAA that were already doing the work, the Volunteer Centre, Alone and all of the groups that we would need to help deliver services to the community and have everything online.
‘I chaired a meeting on Zoom with over 20 people that Sunday afternoon and that was a tremendous amount of work that was done by Paddy Donnelly and John Laurence, and the county librarian Aoibheann and all of their staff, to put that in place over a weekend’.
Meanwhile Louth County Council were already planning how to adapt as the likelihood of restictions became apparent in early March.
In normal circumstances LCC deliver over 600 different services, but as they prepared for lockdown they assesed 16 core essential services which had to be maintained.
‘We had been trying to work our way around being able to deliver those services as much as possible with people working from home. So if you take, say for example the planning service, they could do part of the work from home but there’s part of it you have to go into the office and there are other services are like that.
‘So when the Taoiseach told us on a Friday night, yes we were officially closed down from midnight, we were pretty much ready to go.
‘If I tell you that we have over 200 staff at the moment using council laptops or who have a login on their own computers from home. So we have over 200 of our of our office space staff who are able to do an element of work from home.
‘We managed to get those basic services up and running such as water services, our own HR and payroll, things around keeping the roads open, delivering road repairs if they were urgent, economic development supports to businesses.
Like anyone in the public sector who couldn’t be usefully employed or work from home at present, staff at LCC have made themselves available to the public appointment service for redeployment.
‘Some staff have been working for the HSE and others have put their name foward to the public appointment service to be available’, explained Joan Martin, addiwng ‘very early on in the crisis we wouldl have given help to the COVID call centre that the HSE were running in Ardee’.