Evgenia Brezhneva, a first year student from the Faculty of Law of VSU, volunteers at Voronezh clinical hospitals. The student works at call centres which contribute to the more efficient monitoring of the state of patients. Call centre hotlines can also be used to call a doctor and to get answers to questions.
“I decided to become a volunteer in the middle of September when we had a meeting of student activists at our faculty. I was inspired by stories of our head volunteer Masha Khoroshilova and decided to do volunteer work. I started working in call centres in November when a volunteer recruitment campaign for clinical hospitals had been announced.
We call people with a positive test result for Covid and tell them what they have to do next. We also have a list of questions we need to answer and standardised answers. When people call, we check their questions against the list and give answers. If the question is not on our list, we ask information from doctors or give a contact of the help desk. For example, a woman called recently and asked me why the result of her test for Covid had not been published on the website. This question was not on my list so I asked the hospital staff. It appeared that such issues are beyond the responsibilities of the clinical hospital. As a result, the woman was given the results of her test by phone.
We do not get in contact with people, we sit in places where there are no patients that is why I am not afraid of catching Covid. When I just started working in call centres, I was very nervous. I was worried that I might give a wrong answer or might not be able to give any answer at all, but then I started to feel more at ease. Now I am more confident when answering calls. I have never counted the calls but I am quite sure that at least once I had over a hundred in 4 hours.
When I understand that I can’t provide help by myself, I ask the medical staff of the hospital to help. If I understand that the person is calling a wrong clinical hospital or if there are no medical staff members around to help me, I provide the patients with the phone number of the help desk where they can always get the answer.
When working in call centres, I came to understand how bad the Covid situation is now. And I am glad that I can help people in a way.”
Text by: Alexandra Ganina, Mikhail Yakovenko
