I am a paramedic working for NHS test and trace but I've yet to make a single call

NHS test and trace was meant to be world-beating, but in my experience it’s been a shambles. I am a paramedic who has been working for the service since it launched, but I have yet to make a single call.

Last week I got an email from NHS Professionals, the largest NHS staff bank in the UK. It said it had almost been a month since the service went live, and thanked me for my “hard work and commitment to date”.

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It said: “We already have tens of thousands of people self-isolating and this is down to the hard work of our wonderful tracing team.”

But I’ve done nothing. I’m being paid £18 an hour to sit in front of my computer screen and press refresh every 15 minutes.

I first heard about the opportunity to be a clinical contact tracer from NHS Professionals in mid-May. I normally fill in for shifts in various ambulance services, but those have dried up.

It was a remote working role, which seemed fairly straightforward. I was registered as a clinical contact tracer and set up on the training system. There are three levels to the system. Level 3 people aren’t clinically-trained while level 2 comprises healthcare professionals. Level 1 is meant to be more specialist still. I don’t understand what the difference is, as it seems to be the same system and process.

We weren’t given a start date so I completed the training, which consisted of half-hour videos that tried (and failed) to demonstrate a system that had not been completed.

Nevertheless, I was able to book shifts and was set to go, but for unknown reasons the system was constantly delayed. I was placated with more pointless webinars and a useless workshop on helping people to remember details of events. My instructions were to gather the details of all contacts a person with coronavirus had had over 14 days, and I was told there would be a script to follow.

After this, we were invited to make test calls with each other but I couldn’t do this because the system still wasn’t working. I was given no instructions on how I was meant to phone people and set up a call. Days before NHS test and trace launched, I was playing with a trial system that still hadn’t been completed.

I found out by email late at night that it was to go live at 8am the next morning. Earlier in the day the launch was announced in the daily Downing Street briefing. For weeks afterwards, I couldn’t log in.

I made sure to email the NHS Professionals support desk at the start and end of every shift to update on the situation, but received no response. Two weeks later I gave up and just started opening a ticket with IT at the beginning of every shift and emailing NHS Professionals every hour to try to prompt some kind of response. I sent dozens of emails over the period of a month. Each one received a generic auto-response.

Eventually, someone came back to me but what they said contradicted the advice I’d been given weeks before.

For the past two weeks I have been able to log in, but I have sat in front of my computer with nothing to do. Initially, 400 shifts a day were advertised, varying between four and 12 hours. I booked between 20 and 30 four-hour slots. I’m supposed to have a line manager but I still don’t know who it is.

My experience may be different from others but I don’t think I’m alone in experiencing technical problems and not having much work to do. This may be a good sign or it may suggest the system is not working.

It is a scandal that this system has been described as a success, and an embarrassment that an influenza pandemic has been on top of the national risk register in terms of impact and likelihood for more than a decade, yet no real provision was put in place.

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NHS test and trace is too little, too late. It seems ridiculous that I, a trained healthcare professional, am being paid to do a job that anyone can do. I don’t understand why it is felt healthcare professionals are needed to read a script over the phone. It’s a waste of money.

NHS test and trace has been sold as a “world-beating system”, but everything that could go wrong has. I hope that when this is all over, there will be a massive public and independent inquiry to find out how the UK got it so wrong.