BAGUIO CITY – “The most important skill a person, who will be hired as a contact tracer, must have will be his critical thinking ability,” said the country’s contact tracing czar and City Mayor Benjamin Magalong.
Magalong said that based on experience, a college degree was not the most important requirement that a contact tracer must possess.
“For me, someone who has critical thinking ability, someone who has that investigative mindset. And third, we also need health workers to be part of the contact tracing teams,” he noted.
Magalong also emphasized that a perfect contact tracing team should be composed of an interviewer, who is either a health worker or investigator; an analyst, an encoder, who will handle the data collected; technical support and the community support team, who are members of the Barangay Health Emergency Response Teams (BHERT).
Magalong welcomed the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) move to hire some 500 contact tracers for Cordillera region and beef up local government unit teams, saying it will help improve the operation of the system.
He has suggested in his talk with DILG Undersecretary Bernardo Florece Jr. to downgrade the qualifications of prospective contact tracers to give chance to non-college degree holders to qualify for the position, if they have critical thinking abilities.
Magalong said the city currently utilizes the skills of police investigators who have been trained on cognitive interviewing. They are accompanied by a medical health professional.
“This is a skill that allows the interviewer to squeeze relevant information from a person. In the case of COVID, his activities in the past 14 days prior to testing positive of the virus.”
Magalong wants to organize more back-up teams as reinforcement to prevent wearing out its contact tracers and maintain work quality in the contact tracing program being a vital tool COVID-19 control.
He said the city will train more individuals both paid and volunteers to form additional teams and provide relief to existing ones who have been working hard since the start of the pandemic.
The city has 20 contact tracing teams with 600 trained personnel who help in the processing of identifying close contacts of positive patients and second level contacts. But it needs 200 more contact tracers to maintain work effectiveness and efficiency as virus deterrent.
“At present we have around 40 plus second stringers who we are tapping so the doctors leading the teams can take a rest. The contact tracers have an important role to do in the success of the fights against the coronavirus,” Magalong said.