My Newsradio Scripts

These are my old radio news scripts on Singapore's current affairs when I worked as a broadcast journalist.

Friday, July 29, 2005

OTGV #29 - SARS Contact Tracers

Broadcast Date: 12/05/03

Intro:

In this week's On The Grapevine, join Chong Ching Liang as he looks at the silent but crucial role that contact tracers play in the fight against SARS.

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SARS is such a new bug that there's no real medical fight against it.

There isn't yet a reliable test kit to detect it.

So the containment of its spread is achieved through very exhaustive detective work.

Aside from the healthcare professionals, another front in the battle fought against SARS is engaged by the contact tracers.

Hi I am Chong Ching Liang and welcome to On the Grapevine as I look at the work done by this group of nearly invisible SARS combatants.

Health Officer Han Wee Kiong sheds some light on the working hours of the contact tracers.

"Basically our shifts breaks into 2, the morning shift is from 8 to 4 pm. The afternoon shift is 2 to 10 pm. Basically we work a lot more than our shift. [Average of how many hours ot?] Two to 4 hours just to get all the contacts in because sometimes the cases were hospitalised and we are unable to call them, So we have to call the family members to get the information and most of the time they are unable to give us the information that we need. So we have to try a lot other means to get the information."

Very often, the work follows the contact tracers home even when the shifts or the over-time has ended.

Mr Han admits to thinking about cases which he couldn't or didn't manage to contact even when he is at home and getting ready for bed.

Minister of State for Education and Manpower Ng Eng Hen says the fight against SARS provides a constantly evolving learning curve for the government.

One of the lessons learnt is that it is not only a medical battle but a logistic battle to allocate resources to help the Health Ministry.

"If you think about it, how have we fought this war? Not with drugs at all. It's not a medical war. It's a logistical war. So putting 9 Div commander contact tracing, what is contact tracing? Asking who you've been in contact, there's nothing medical about it. Doctors are never meant to do that."

Initially, the Health Ministry started with a team of some 20 contact tracers.

This grew to 60 and then 80 in total strength.

The biggest test for the endurance and resourcefulness of the Health Ministry's contact tracers was when the SARS bug escaped the confines of Tan Tock Seng Hospital and spread to the Singapore General Hospital in late March.

Mr Han on the workload then.

"The workload was quite tremendous for our team. Basically we have to investigate about 6 to 7 cases a day. Imagine the number of visitors and the visitors who visit the hospital. We basically have to make quite a number of calls per officers. There were cases where actually the contacts could grow up to one, two hundred. So we've break down to a group of ten, we all have to make about ten calls. If we have more cases, if one person is handling one case, you have to call 50 to a hundred times."

But something else happened that stretched the initial team of contact tracers even more.

The Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market.

The workload became nightmarish with an anticipated list of some two thousand contacts to be traced.

So the government beefed up the stretched resources of the Health Ministry by sending one hundred and sixty MINDEF personnel to help out the contact tracers on the 25th of last month.

Here's one of them.

"I'm Captain Thomas Neo, I am from the Ministry of Defence. I am assisting by operating as one of the four executive officers that's running the shift in the contact tracing team. currently there are two shifts. One shift comprises of 12 teams of approximately ten men so it makes a total of 240 of which 160 men are from the Ministry of Defence whereas the other 60 men are from the Ministry of Health."

Captain Neo on what his team faced when they arrived.

"There were a lot of contacts to be made. The workload then was more. More calls to be made, more people to establish contacts, for us to compile the figures. Per person I would say it'll depending on day to day but on average, we are talking about 50 to 60 depending on the number of cases at hand. Depending on how voluminous the cases have churned out in terms of contacts."

But contact tracing is a skill, each tracer has to ferret out information that the interviewees have either forgotten, can't recollect or willfully tried to keep it from coming out.

Minister of State for Health Balaji Sadasivan on the importance of contact tracing even on the tracking of SARS worldwide.

"Contact tracing is an important medical tool in the control of SARS and the fact that there's a border doesn't reduce it's importance. The reasons why you need to contact trace are if you have SARS you need to catch it from someone. So you want to go back and find the source of the SARS because if the source can be identified, then other people who may have caught SARS can be identified and ring-fenced."

So good contact tracers are essential.

Captain Neo on the training his team received.

"the focus was really what we really deem necessary was to give our guys who are new, hands-on training. That is what we deem as relevant. They were attached to the teams that were already functioning in the MOH. There were attached to them, they had some hands-on training. After 3 days when we deem they are ready to be on their own, before we branch them out as a support to the current batch of people doing contact tracing."

Thrown straight into the deep-end, a lot of the lessons are learnt on the job.

The worse may be over after the extreme case of Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market but at least, Singapore now has a team of two hundred and forty contact tracers to deal with whatever may come.

This is Chong Ching Liang for Newsradio 938. (now 938Live)

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Related Links:

Newsradio938 (now 938Live)
http://www.938live.sg/

Ministry of Health SARS website
http://www.moh.gov.sg/corp/sars/index.html

World Health Organisation SARS website
http://www.who.int/topics/sars/en/

National Development Ministry's News Release on Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market
http://www.mnd.gov.sg/Newsroom/newsreleases/2003/news280403.htm

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