DESPITE COVID-19, free status for over 5 months now, the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS) continues with its COVID-19 preparedness ahead of a possible COVID-19 community transmission. This week focus has been on capacitating itself in terms of human resource surge for contact tracing.
Contact tracing is a critical component of COVID-19 preparedness and response of the Ministry of health with the key function of detecting the extent of spread of COVID-19 should a positive case is registered from the community, for appropriate actions such as quarantining or isolating infected persons.
With COVID-19, more especially the delta variant that spreads rapidly, alertness and timely detection of the magnitude of COVID-19 spread in terms of the number of people and their locality will be a nightmare for health workers since it will require significant number of people to do the job.
Therefore, MHMS is extending its hand to workers from other government line ministries.
This week MHMS surveillance team trained over 30 officers mainly from the ministry of Education and Human Resources, Justice and Legal affairs, Culture and Tourism and the National Judiciary to be able to support with contact tracing should the need arise.
Dr Nemia Bainivalu, Incident Controller National Health and Emergency Operation Centre, MHMS, explained that in order to conduct contact tracing, Infection, Prevention and Control measures are crucial to ensure safety of contact tracers, their colleagues, families and communities.
“This is what this training is all about, building a pool of human resources with the knowledge and skills to conduct contact tracing and more importantly to be able to do this task in a safe manner”,
“Sincere thank you to all these line ministries for availing your personals for this task and I thank each and every one of you participants for your willingness to support health in its COVID-19 pandemic response”, stated Dr Bainivalu.
He added that COVID-19 affects everyone and thus our response approach should be whole of government. Together we will be able to combat any community transmission of COVID-19 more effectively and efficiently”, said Dr Bainivalu.
The training is the first of its kind and will also extend for other remaining ministries as well.
The Ministry of Health remains grateful to all individuals, organizations, donors and partners, private sector, churches and communities for continues support towards health as the lead government agency in this COVID-19 pandemic preparedness and response.
