How teenagers ended up operating crucial parts of England’s T & T system

While the job is officially advertised at between £16.97 and £27.15 per hour, they are all being paid the minimum wage, which means £6.45 for 18- to 20-year-olds & £8.72 for over-25s https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/28/england-coronavirus-covid-test-and-trace-teenagers

The rôle had been advertised

“applicants must be at Clinician Band 6 level, who will be working as part of a team of “experienced clinicians”. You must have a health or science degree or “demonstrable equivalent experience or qualifications”;

“experience in “a field related to public health or health and social care services as a practitioner” and “registration with the relevant professional body”.

Among your tasks are “conducting a public health risk assessment”, “providing public health advice” and “using your clinical knowledge to help escalate complex cases”. Anyone accepted for this role would be “provided with appropriate training”.

“The “appropriate training” for the magical transformation to “experienced clinician”, my contact tells me, lasted four hours. It was conducted remotely, as they now work from home,

“and consisted of a PowerPoint presentation, an online conversation, a quiz, some e-learning modules and some new call scripts. “We weren’t asked if we wanted to ‘upskill’: there was no consultation and no choice. We were just told.”

So how has it gone?

“As you might have guessed, it’s an absolute shitshow”

During the first hour of the first day 3 of the young tracers called people who had just lost a loved one to Covid and were in extreme distress.

No training. Just a few shallow speech bubbles.

Who made the decision that this was appropriate?

Serco says it was the Government and the DHSC confirmed that it was indeed.

I think we need to understand a lot more about that.

Whilst Serco says people volunteered that is refuted by those doing the work.

They were told.

The workers refute that clinically trained staff are asking the questions. They just go down a checklist and tell them to phone 111 if they want health advice.

Teenagers, on minimum wage and eminently exploitable.

Meanwhile Serco’s shares surge. Their dividends are our money

“At the same time, the NHS is so underfunded that it is now asking volunteers to fill critical positions. A recent series of advertisements called for applicants for the posts of project manager, lead data warehouse developer and business analyst to work unpaid”

These sort of contracts would usually offer between £450 and £550 a day.

“The government is using the pandemic to shift the boundaries between public and private provision, restructure public health and pass lucrative contracts to poorly qualified private companies. The inevitable result is a galactic cockup.”

“This is what you get from a government that values money above human life.”

Re the teenagers.

It isn’t even as if they are seated in a call centre with qualified medical personnel earwigging what they are hearing and saying all the time and being able to step in swiftly if there is a problem.

These kids are working remotely.