Contact Tracing: Rapidly Identify Possible Cases of COVID-19 in Boarding

With lockdown measures easing, boarding schools now face a host of challenges as they plan to safely reopen and reassure pupils, families and staff that boarding is a safe environment to return to.To help during these challenging times, we’ve been working on some new developments specifically designed to help boarding schools uphold responsibilities and adapt procedures to the recommended COVID guidelines.In our recent webinar series, we explored a few of those developments (watch recordings here) and today, we’re announcing the first release - Contact Tracing Reports.Contact Tracing Reports are designed to help rapidly identify secondary cases that may arise after transmission from an identified positive or suspected case of Covid-19.

Why “Contact Tracing”?

The common thread among the recommended guidelines is that Boarding Schools and Residential Care Facilities should establish systems to monitor staff and boarders for COVID-19 with a high level of vigilance and have a low threshold for investigation.The reason for this is simple. Effective surveillance of COVID-like symptoms will facilitate early identification of possible cases, therefore enabling you to implement control measures faster and hopefully reduce or even eliminate the rate of transmission.Our new “Contact Tracing Reports” help to rapidly identify which students might have been in contact with a possible case of COVID, so you can prioritise testing, quarantine and other control measures to minimise the rate of transmission and prevent a severe outbreak from occurring.

How does it work?

In the scenario where a possible case of COVID has been identified, you can quickly pull up the contact tracing report directly from the student profile.The report will provide you with a list of frequent contacts and locations that student has recently been associated with. The results of which are based on the relationship between the location history of the subject student and the rest of the student database.You can also view a detailed list of students which includes overall time spent with each student, exact locations and specific overlapping timeframes. From here, you can then prioritise this list and directly add them to a Watchlist or easily export records into a spreadsheet to initiate the next step.

With the watchlist, you can assign a specific pastoral record with a COVID related category (ie. Suspected Case), add a description and automatically notify staff, students and parents all within the same workflow.

Once students are added to the Watchlist, all staff users will be able to view the same dynamic list and access required information to initiate follow up procedures. This might include sending a symptom survey to the watchlist students or initiating a workflow for managing an outbreak.In our recent webinar series, we explored several other ways you can use Boardingware to help with COVID scenarios, such as using forms for self-reporting symptoms and  creating custom workflows - You can watch the recordings here.

Doing our part to help

During these difficult times, we want to do our part to help the boarding community as they face the challenge of adapting to the on-going impacts of Covid-19.To do our part, we are providing all customers with free access to our Contact Tracing Reports. In addition to that, we are also running a Covid-Relief program for schools that are considering Boardingware but are facing budget constraints due to Covid.If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our special offers, please don’t hesitate to contact support or schedule a call with our solutions team.Published with StoryChief