August 27, 2020
Cultural skills needed for contact tracing
A Māori representative on the COVID-19 Surveillance and Testing Strategy Group is keen to see more Māori and Pasifika people in contract tracing positions.
Dr Rawiri Jansen, a south Auckland GP and co-leader of Māori pandemic response group Te Rōpu Whakakaupapa Uruta, says there are now a good number of Māori and Pasifika on the front line doing testing or greeting people at the door.
The next step is taking some of them off swabbing and put them in the call centre.
"You know the skills you need to be able to ring someone up and be able to talk to them about COVID and COVID postive and contacts, so I really want the contact tracing to be culturally concordant and linguistically concordant. We can match the staff that is doing contact tracing and the community that we are serving," Dr Jansen says.
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