HSE chief issues apology to 2,000 patients asked to trace contacts
THE HSE chief executive has apologised to 2,000 people for asking them to notify their own close contacts after testing positive for Covid-19 due to a breakdown in the HSE’s contacttracing system.
Paul Reid defended the way the HSE handled the matter, saying it had to make decisions ‘rapidly and quickly’ to stay ahead of the virus.
He admitted that the Government should have been informed and said he ‘took responsibility’ for not doing so.
Mr Reid said: ‘I personally, and on behalf of the HSE, apologise to those 2,000 people. It wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly but it was the right decision.
‘It was a decision based on a clinical, operational and a risk-based assessment of what was the right thing to do at that point of time as Monday moved into Tuesday, and
Donnelly seeking report on contracts
we were faced with a backlog with those number of cases.’
He made the comments at a HSE briefing yesterday afternoon – hours after Ireland entered its second full lockdown in a bid to halt the spread of coronavirus.
Pressure is mounting on political leaders over the country’s testingand-tracing regime, which has continued to attract criticism for its questionable efficiency.
It emerged earlier this week the system had come under too much pressure at the weekend and the close contacts of about 2,000 who tested positive for coronavirus would not be contacted by the HSE’s contact-tracing team.
Instead they had to tell their own close contacts to arrange their own Covid test through their GP.
Mr Reid blamed a ‘scheduling issue’ for the backlog and said the HSE was also dealing with increased volumes of calls, and that those calls had become more complex and longer in duration.
He said: ‘We did not have enough people to cope with the rapid acceleration of cases that we saw on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
We are dealing and have been dealing with a pandemic that is practically out of control in the community and when it gets out of control it has significant impacts on the wider health service overall.’
Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Health Minister Stephen Donnelly only became aware of a breakdown i n the contact- tracing system when it was reported in the media. Mr Martin said he was annoyed he had not been informed of the issue but he understood the pressure the health service was under. ‘Whilst I was annoyed with what happened, I was also annoyed with not having been told about it directly, at the same time I would like to acknowledge that people are working under great stress and strain at all levels since the pandemic began,’ he said.
Earlier Mr Donnelly said that his department should have been told by the HSE. ‘There are numerous ways in which Government could have been told,’ he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland yesterday. ‘This was an operational decision taken by the HSE on a Monday, but let’s be clear, people are incorrectly saying the contact-tracing system has fallen down. It absolutely hasn’t. What happened was the contacttracing teams are being ramped up very quickly. In the last six weeks they are now making 400% more calls than they did.’ He said he had been assured by the HSE it will not happen again.
Mr Donnelly has also written to the HSE for a full report on the contracts of contact tracers after People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said workers are being offered zero-hour contracts.