Phone lifeline: How 300 travel agents became Healthline staffers
As calls to our national telehealth service climbed 10 times above normal levels last year, people were sometimes waiting more than an hour to get through to a registered nurse after Covid-19 first arrived in New Zealand.
Healthline chief executive Andrew Slater knew he needed to act fast to get more people on the other end of the phone and, when the handbrake came on international travel in March, 300 employees fromhouse of Travel joined Healthline to help field the calls.
Rachael Dvorsky was a manager for Orbit World Travel when she joined the non- clinical Covid-19 response team for Healthline.
Dvorsky said calls from stressed people missing flights or landing in a foreign country with their luggage elsewhere had given her teamenough experience to deal with welfare checks for people stressed about selfisolating.
“Because everything happened so fast, I was running on adrenaline a bit,” Dvorsky said.
“I felt really grateful to have an opportunity when I knewa lot of people didn’t. It was pretty awesome to be able to help New Zealand out.”
As the call volume continued to climb, Slater realised the telecommunication infrastructure would need to be scaled up.
“We had to deliver a five-month technology project in just seven days,” Slater said.
A critical piece to the puzzle of how to have more capacity for calls was a server. The pandemic disrupted global supply chains for technology, but Slater managed to find the only server left of its kind in the United States.
Fortunately, he could get it into New Zealand as an urgent delivery on March 26 and the staff in call centres around New Zealandwere online.
“It made our infrastructure six times bigger,” Slater said. More than one million calls were answered between February and December — five times the amount answered in the same period in 2019.
Nurse Jennifer Calius was working for the telehealth service for a year before the pandemic hit.
Usually dashboard would show staff that two or three people were waiting to speak to anurse but in 2020 sometimes that number would be in the hundreds, she said.
“We could see the numbers going up and you have concern about the
a peoplewho arewaiting . . . that someonewho needed urgent help could be waiting.”
Calius said that in January the calls about Covid-19 were mainly from people with family returning home from China. They wanted advice to keep themselves safe and limit the spread.
Things took a turn in February. “[The early calls] were peoplewho were really keen to do the right thing. They were scared because they knew what was happening in China.”
Many were preparing ahead of time and knew their family would have to go into lockdown. “When things started getting a bit crazy in Italy the calls started becoming more urgent. Peoplewere panicking.”
Racist and abusive calls started coming in, Calius said.“it was quite horrible. It wasn’t the majority, but it was quite disturbing.”
Slater told his staff they didn’t have to put up with the “really shocking” racismwitnessed in those earlyweeks of thepandemic and hewouldn’t hesitate to take the call himself to give them a piece of hismind.
“The spread of misinformation in Februarywas really disheartening for us and the team. It had undertones of racism, absolutely,” Slater said.
Calius, who worked as a nurse in intensive care units and emergency departments of hospitals beforemoving into telehealth in 2018, said the camaraderie within the Healthline team during the Covid alert level 4 was really important.
“It’s somethingwe always train for. You trust your colleagues can suddenly pick up a few gears and step in. We all felt that sense of responsibility about making sure we could speak to everyonewho needed to speak to us.”
The Ministry of Health’s acting deputy director- general for health system improvement and innovation, Clare Perry, said Healthline has been an important part of New Zealand’s response to the virus.
“Its ability to provide people with free and accurate health advice and support has been an integral part of our Covid-19 response.”