Agency-employed Covid-19 contact tracers will not get €1,000 pandemic bonus

Hundreds of people employed as Covid-19 contact tracers during the pandemic learned in recent days that an appeal to be paid the Government’s €1,000 pandemic bonus was unsuccessful.

Contact tracers employed through CPL, the private recruitment agency, were not included in the list of people deemed eligible for the “pandemic special recognition payment” – as outlined in a Health Service Executive circular last year based on a Government decision of January 2022.

They sought to overturn the decision through the HSE appeals process.

The contract employees were told by the dispute resolution committee that decides on appeals that they were unsuccessful in their appeal and they would not receive the bonus.

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There were about 1,700 people trained in contact tracing with more than 800 people deployed at peak during the worst wave of the pandemic in January 2022. The majority were agency staff.

“Please be advised that as you were employed by an agency, you do not fall within the scope of the circular. Accordingly, you should direct your application to your agency directly,” the contact tracers were told in a decision posted by the dispute resolution committee on February 14th.

[ Contact tracers feel ‘thrown on the scrapheap’ amid latest Covid-19 wave ]

The HSE directed questions to the Department of Health who responded with the list of people who were eligible for the bonus, which did not include agency-employed contact tracers.

A spokeswoman for the department said it could not comment on the eligibility of individual cases. She said the criteria for paying the bonus included but was not limited to those working in a frontline “Covid-exposed” environment and the period of work in such an environment.

The list of people who received the bonus included those working in agency roles within the HSE. HSE staff who were seconded to contact tracing during the pandemic received the bonus.

Agency-employed contact tracers expressed anger at being excluded particularly because they felt they were poorly paid while assisting the HSE’s public health teams during the pandemic.

“We were not face-to-face with Covid patients, but we acted as the first line of triage for the HSE. We massively reduced the vast numbers looking to attend surgeries and hospitals, and identified thousands of emergency cases early who would have been missed,” said one tracer.

[ Covid-19 contact tracers may be redeployed to clear passport applications backlog ]

[ Man in his 70s turned down for Covid-19 contact tracer role loses discrimination claim ]

“Volunteers were paid €12 an hour for 12-hour shifts for nearly two years and the State never even thanked us, and now it refuses the reward it promised.”

The department spokesman said the Government “expressed sincere gratitude to all healthcare workers for their efforts during what has been a challenging period for our health services”.

The HSE began winding down contact tracing last year with agency-employed staff being advised to apply for a limited number of roles in another area of the health system.