Ms Niamh O'Beirne:

I will address the questions on the quality of calls and the time spent on the phone. At different points in the disease, we spend different amounts of time on the phone with individuals. We did call people to discuss having a positive result. It is a very difficult call for people to receive that news and understand how they should isolate and manage their illness. Following that, there is another call with them to talk about their close contacts. From a quality perspective, it is important to spend time with people trying to understand that and elicit information from them. We make another call to close contacts which may be quite fast. The person may already be aware if they are a family member or close contact, so they accept that and we arrange the test. We do not tell people we call who the index case is, so in other calls there might be a lot of questions and we spend some time with them to encourage them to go for a test. We do not have metrics where we tell our staff how many calls per hour they need to do. We do training with them to understand that it is mostly about quality. Having said that, we know how many calls we need to do. We made 38,000 calls last week. We must make sure that enough staff are on at varying points in the disease to be able to spend time with people on the phone and give them all the information they need for us to be able to contact their close contacts and get them organised for a test to reduce transmission.