As COVID-19 cases emerged in NSW calls to the Ministry’s reception increased rapidly, with people wanting to know what the virus and possible restrictions meant for them. There was no identified area or team that these calls could be transferred to. At that time, if NSW Health was Googled the Ministry reception phone number was the first contact number the public encountered.
On 29 January 2020, the COVID-19 Information Call Centre was established by the Centre for Population Health (CPH), within two hours of a request from the Chief Health Officer to assist in handling calls from the public. The call centre operated Monday to Friday from 8am to 5pm and was initially staffed by a team of five CPH staff; this swelled to a pool of almost 30 staff, with an average of eight to ten staff working per shift. The call centre was staffed by volunteers from a range of professional disciplines and backgrounds from across CPH, and later included staff from across the Ministry and additional staff sourced from other agencies via the Public Service Commission.
Very few staff were experienced in working in a call centre. Key challenges centred around dealing with difficult customers and calls in such high volumes that it was often difficult to respond to them all. Between 29 January and 14 July 2020, the call centre handled 17,194 calls, with the daily peak on 23 March of over 407. The most common queries related to exemptions from public health orders, business/employment, social gatherings/movement, access to PPE, and laboratory testing.
Several months into its operation it became clear that a more sustainable and efficient business model was required. Service NSW had established a COVID Call Centre which received mainly business and travel-related calls (60% of calls to the Ministry call centre). Following negotiations between the Public Health Emergency Operations Centre, State Health Emergency Operations Centre and Service NSW, these call centre functions were taken over by Service NSW on 14 July 2020, using trained call centre staff.
The rapid stand up of the call centre showed the agility with which population health staff were deployed to support the pandemic response and the willingness of staff to make a positive contribution to the response despite the challenges.
John Ward1, Megan Cobcroft1
