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The NHS testing and tracking system in England will cut 6,000 employees by the end of August, the government has announced.
The remaining contacts will work alongside local public health teams to reach more infected people and their contacts in communities.
This follows demands for more data and information from local health managers.
The approach has already been used in coronavirus hotspots in Blackburn with Darwen, Luton and Leicester.
And it is now being offered to all councils that are responsible for public health in their area.
Test and trace is staffed by NHS clinicians and people who were trained to be contacts during the pandemic.
NHS staff offering advice to people who have tested positive for coronavirus will not be fired.
But the national service will shrink from 18,000 contacts to 12,000 with the remaining non-NHS callers re-deployed as part of dedicated local test and tracking teams, the health department said.
This means that local areas will have “ring-fenced teams” from the National Testing and Tracking Service.
Another 200 residential test centers will also be open until October.
As part of NHS Test and Trace, public health teams dealing with outbreaks in factories or care homes have consistently reached more than 90% of the contacts on their lists.
Outside of those highly localized outbreaks, there are call centers that track contacts.
But they do not reach as many contacts – their success rate for reaching contacts who do not live together reached in mid-July at just over 70%, but has since fallen.
A return to parental contact tracking?
In May, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that an “army” of contact tracers would be recruited for the NHS Test and Trace service.
Somewhere there were reports that new recruits were sitting idle – with one telling the BBC they were spending their time on Netflix.
Thousands are now employed in England with more of their work carried out by local staff with knowledge of their area. The health department said this was a “more tailored approach”.
But critics will see it as the last example of the government deviating from its centralized approach to tackling the outbreak. In June, the government had to abandon its idea of using a nationwide app to identify potentially infected people – because it did not work.
Now, the top-down, high-tech strategy for contact tracking is making way for what consistently local public health officials describe as old-fashioned “shoe leather epidemiology.”
This depends on people with local knowledge gathering information by going door to door.
‘Localized approach’
Dido Harding, Head of NHS Test and Trace, said: “We have always been clear that NHS Test and Trace standard should be local and that we do not operate alone – we work with and through partners across the country.
“As we learn more about the spread of the disease, we can move on to our planned next step and become even more effective in tackling the virus.
“After successful trials in a small number of local areas, I am very pleased to announce that we are now offering this integrated localized approach to all local authorities to ensure we can reach more people in their communities and the spread of Covid-19 can stop, ”she said.
