Province hiring 500 more COVID contact tracers

The B.C. government has announced the hiring of 500 more health care professionals to increase COVID-19 contact tracing around the province.

Premier John Horgan told a virtual news conference in Victoria, the positions will be temporary.

“We expect many will be retired nurses and other health care professionals as well as recent graduates,” Horgan said. “Our plan will allow health authorities to increase the number of public health workers focused on COVID-19 and it will also ensure that we have teams that we can deploy across the province as required.”

The positions will start in September.

Contact tracing works by following up with each person who has tested positive for COVID-19 to understand who their contacts may be and providing appropriate followup. Health authorities’ public health teams typically have staff who do contact tracing of communicable diseases as part of their regular work. However, given the scale of the response needed for COVID-19, additional supports are necessary.

Dr. Bonnie Henry, provincial health officer, said contact tracing is the process public health uses when someone is infected with a transmittable disease, to prevent transmission, and others getting sick.

“This is bread and butter work for public health,” Henry said.

Some of the new positions will help to support public health services, such as providing education in communities, and possibly immunizing for influenza and other diseases.

The positions will be recruited by the Provincial Health Services Authority and the regional health authorities. This will allow health authorities to increase their local pool of available public health professionals, while also providing a team of people that are available to be deployed throughout the province as needed. The Ministry of Health is working with Health Match BC and the health authorities to manage the recruitment process.

“As we have seen in recent weeks, strong contact tracing is absolutely crucial when dealing with community outbreaks as we slowly and safely increase our contacts,” Minister of Health Adrian Dix said. “Our health care workers have gone beyond the call of duty during the pandemic, and we are putting out this call to these dedicated professionals to bolster our contact tracing capacity and prepare us for a potential surge of COVID-19 in the fall.”