Ms Niamh O'Beirne:

So far we have recruited 274 people, about 25% of whom have been clinical staff. Overall, as we mentioned in our briefing note, we need about 40% of the team to be clinical to balance the teams that are non-clinical. To respond to the question why they are clinical, our tracers speak to people about their illness and talk to them about their self-isolation and restricted movement, and it is very important that people understand what they need to do. In addition, patients can be quite anxious when they receive the news, as Senator Conway mentioned, so it takes some time to talk them through what they need to do and to spend time with them gathering their close contacts and their information. Our recruitment is ongoing and we keep the balance as we recruit to make sure we have enough on both sides, clinical and non-clinical.

We were asked a question about our experience with people on the phone and how they react. Our tracers sometimes have difficult phone calls with people, particularly those who are close contacts. They find being told very difficult because it means they need to restrict their movements for 14 days and also need to do tests.

Unlike a standard call centre call, these calls can take quite a long time and are really important. A tracer could spend up to an hour trying to convince people to go for a test but they would generally be in the minority. The vast majority of people are receptive to our tracers and would follow the public health advice and attend their test. We have seen a much higher number of people turning up for their day one tests, more than 92% at the moment, and the day zero test is up in the 60s, which is much higher than it was in the summer.

The Senator also asked about reducing the questions. As of this week, we are still operating on a reduced level of questions. We will bring this back so over the next six weeks we will start to increase the number of questions we ask to increase the amount of retrospective tracing we do. That will become very important when we have low levels of the disease. Dr. Kelleher may wish to add something on that point.