Albury Wodonga Health says more than 300 residents have expressed interest in joining a COVID-19 health surge workforce after a recruitment drive was publicised on the weekend.
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Executive director of public health Lucie Shanahan said AWH were calling for people interested in working in contact tracing, testing and vaccination due to anticipating an increasing number of exposure sites and positive cases across the region, after last week's three cases in Albury.
"We've had a phenomenal response from people expressing interest," she said.
"To date we've had over 300 people expressing interest in supporting the public health unit and perhaps picking up some roles and functions through our public health response.
"We're working through those expressions of interest at the moment and our onboarding team are considering how we can progress those as soon as possible."
Ms Shanahan said there was no limit to the number of positions that needed to be filled.
"We don't have a set number of positions," she said.
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"One of the interesting pieces of trying to manage a global pandemic is that at any time we may require a high number of people to come forward and support the various functions and then that could easily drop back too.
"So last week we were working in anticipation of needing to scale up our workforce fairly rapidly and whilst we're continuing planning to do that, the fairly stable rates that we've had across Albury in recent days is an encouraging sign that we may not need the surge workforce that we've been aiming for.
"Not to say that we wont need it, because as we've learnt in the last week things can change really rapidly."
Ms Shanahan said training would be provided to any new staff members.
"There absolutely will be training available to people to make sure that people have the skills knowledge and feel confident to be able to undertake the various tasks we have," she said.
"And that's in vaccination, in testing and also in contact tracing, so support is provided for people before they're required to go fill the tasks."
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