‘I’m helping to reduce spread of the virus’
When the pandemic started, NHS nurse Josie Hitchen was taking a career break. In fact, she was in Bali, training to be a yoga instructor. “I flew back into lockdown and responded to the fast tracking route on the NHS Professionals website,” she explains. “This took me straight back onto the ward at my local hospital in Middlesbrough as a nurse.” Soon afterwards, NHS Professionals sent her email about openings for contact tracers. She said: “Public health promotion has always been something I’m interested in so I applied and I got a position.” She started training immediately – this involved everything from understanding the coronavirus to familiarising herself with data protection and the various systems used in tracing. “I was also lucky enough to be involved in some roleplay calls before the system went live.” Josie now mixes nursing shifts with contact tracing shifts. She has children and her husband is currently away. Her mother is a designated carer for her youngest (the others can go to school as she is a key worker) but the flexibility of shiftwork suits her well and fits around her family life. She has already contact traced 10 people. Josie said: “You log on to various systems and you get assigned cases. Then you run the record of the patient to get a bit of their information and prepare yourself. Next, you call them, explain who you are, where you’re calling from, what contact tracing will do, how it can help prevent the spread of the virus and ask if they’re happy to proceed.” Next, the tracers take them through a questionnaire on a government website. This asks for details such as where they’ve been, who has been in the house with them, where they’ve worked and so on. People can fill these in this questionnaire themselves, but not everyone has a smartphone or is comfortable doing it unassisted. The average call takes about 45 minutes. Josie said: “I’m really enjoying it. It’s been very interesting to learn about the coronavirus and the systems we use and I’ve had lots of positive feedback.”