Only a call away
They speak to the anxious, the fearful and the dreadfully ill. Katarina Williams meets the nurses who answer the country’s Covid-19 phone line.
Sheryl Fife is a close confidant to many but few have ever seen her face. The self-confessed ‘‘gypsy’’ is the real-life characterisation of an old adage that exists in the medical fraternity – nursing isn’t a job; it’s a calling.
And she’s been answering the call on and off for more than a decade.
Fife is a registered nurse at Healthline and, more recently, has been manning the Covid-19 hotline, a service that has grown exponentially in recent weeks.
Callers confess their darkest fears to Fife, a stranger they cannot see. Anxiety. Frustration. Concern. Uncertainty. These are all emotions Fife can feel dripping down the phone line.
While she can’t look her clients in the eye, Fife quickly builds a connection, soothing their worries, listening to their stories, and offering advice and support.
And for some, the woman speaking to them from her home office in Rotorua quickly becomes their lifeline.
‘‘It’s challenging. And you’ve got to use all your knowledge. Each call is different and every time you pick up a call, you don’t really know what you’re going to be dealing with,’’ Fife said.
As the death toll mounts across the world, there has been heightened concern about the threat of Covid-19 to life here in New Zealand.
Fife said many callers ringing the specialist hotline are ‘‘too scared to go to their doctors’’ while others simply want to be tested.
‘‘Some people are, understandably, anxious. They talk about being in the supermarket and somebody coughed, and they don’t know, so they’re ringing us to find out. It’s just about giving them reassurance,’’ Fife said.
‘‘If you’ve got symptoms, you need to get seen but we can come up with a plan for them to make them get seen and feel less anxious.’’
Homecare Medical is a social enterprise that holds a 10-year agreement to run the country’s telehealth services.
Alongside Healthline, these services include Quitline, national sexual harm helpline Safe To Talk, the Alcohol Drug Helpline and Live Kidney Donation hotlines.
The company also mans several mental health, depression and anxiety counselling and support hotlines. It even operated helplines after the Christchurch terror attacks and Whakaari/ White Island eruption.
In a normal week, the company’s call centres would receive around 7000 calls. In March, that number exploded to 166,000 – an increase of 2271 per cent – across all of its hotlines.
The logistics of dramatically scaling up Homecare Medical’s operations has been no mean feat. Before Covid-19, its telehealth services had about 450 employees. Now the company has a staggering 1100 staff on its books.
In the past six weeks, five additional contact centres have been pulled together at a speed so fast it would make your head spin.
As well as catering for public demand, the extra space was needed to ensure physical distancing.
Spark helped deliver a fivemonth IT project in just seven, short, working days, enabling some staff to work from home.
A raft of other organisations, including St John Ambulance, district health boards and Plunket, have supplied their expertise. Even travel agency staff have provided additional manpower on non-clinical assessments.
Chief executive Andrew Slater said when the first wave of Covid19 cases arrived in February, Mandarin, Cantonese and Farsi speakers began manning the phone lines.
Relationships were also forged with the Italian and Chinese communities, completing outbound calls to check on those self-isolating.
But with the situation escalating at such a rapid rate, there were bound to be speed wobbles.
In mid-March, reports emerged of callers desperately seeking Covid-19 advice having to wait hours to get through. Some even had their calls cut off.
The contact centres were being inundated, experiencing call flows up to seven times the norm.
Reading those stories was difficult for Slater but he knew they were struggling.
‘‘We knew that we weren’t answering calls as fast as the New Zealand public needed us to,’’ he explained.
The job his team does isn’t glamorous but Slater said his staff feel a great ‘‘sense of
Sheryl Fife
achievement’’ knowing they are helping others and serving a purpose.
‘‘I don’t think you would find anyone here who would say that they are enjoying the work, because I think the key thing here is that everyone’s rolling up their sleeves and doing the job that needs to be done.
‘‘For the person calling, this might be the most important thing they do today, or in their life, and we need to make sure we take every phone call through that lens,’’ Slater said.
In contrast to Fife, teletriage nurse Ginny Douglas has been a clinical co-ordinator for the Covid-19 team for only four weeks.
She spent most of her 20-odd years of nursing experience in recovery rooms, ‘‘waking people up from anaesthetics’’.
‘‘So it’s a little bit different,’’ Douglas said, laughing.
Her new job, based at a call centre in Auckland’s Grafton, requires her to assess a person’s clinical condition relying on only one sense – forcing call-takers to be creative in the way they extract information.
One of the groups most vulnerable to Covid-19 is the elderly. And while the Government has continually pushed people to scour the website for information, for many in this demographic, it’s out of the question.
‘‘They’re typically a really stoic generation, so they sometimes don’t reach out for a while.
‘‘If they’ve picked up the phone to call, they’re really needing somebody to help them,’’ Douglas said.
Fife admits there have been times throughout her career when she has ruminated over a call long after her shift has ended but it was something she tried to avoid.
‘‘What we tell new nurses to do is ‘don’t go home with that call in your head’. If you’re unsure about it, call and talk to one of the senior nurses.
‘‘Just check that you’ve done everything right and you can let it go, and not worry about the call all night long,’’ Fife said.
One of things she was incredibly grateful for was all the health professionals who have come out of retirement to help with the Covid-19 response.
‘‘They’ve trained and jumped on the phones to help us. It’s been great,’’ she added.
‘‘Each call is different and every time you pick up a call, you don’t really know what you’re going to be dealing with.’’