The Croatian Medical Chamber on Friday welcomed the Health Ministry's initiative to establish call centres for tracing contacts of Covid-19 patients and suggested hiring over 1,200 medical staff registered with the Employment Service for contact tracing.

As a first step, the Chamber suggests that call centres at public health institutes hire over 1,200 nondoctors who are awaiting internship for contact tracing.

This month, due to the sudden surge in the number of Covid patients, the contact tracing system is bursting at the seams, so the Chamber welcomes Minister Vili Beros’s initiative for urgently establishing call centres to step up contact tracing.

An efficient system of testing, tracing and isolating contacts is a prerequisite for establishing as normal a life as possible without the need to impose the strictest measures, the Medical Chamber said.

According to their proposal, non-doctors and non-medical staff would undergo the necessary training before being hired to work at public health institute call centres under epidemiologists’ supervision.