It was January 31, 2020, and the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health in California had just recorded its first case of COVID-19. Two months later, the county issued one of the nation’s first stay-at-home orders to address the rising number of local COVID cases. It was becoming clear to county officials that they would need to mount a rapid response to the escalating crisis. They reached out to Heluna Health for help.
“Heluna Health’s support was invaluable in helping the county build, train, and lead its 1,000-person COVID-19 contact tracing workforce,” says Sarah L. Rudman, Assistant Public Health Officer with Santa Clara County’s Department of Public Health. “Without Heluna Health, the county could not have achieved this. It was an unprecedented increase in capacity in such a short amount of time.”
The intensive efforts to scale-up Santa Clara County’s critical pandemic case investigation and contact tracing (CICT) and mobile vaccination response efforts aimed to build a dynamic COVID-19 response workforce. County workers shifted their duties to respond to the pandemic as contact tracers. To supplement this effort, volunteers from the community were recruited to fill key roles. Heluna Health provided staffing services to support the hiring, onboarding, and training of 800 combined support personnel (Disaster Service Workers, California state employees, and Heluna Health staff) and more than 500 active volunteers, while also delivering technical support, direct supervision, and guidance to the teams.
Altogether, the teams completed more than 91,000 case investigations, reached over 52,000 individuals through contact tracing activities, and supported the development and implementation of a multi-level staffing infrastructure to expand and sustain the county’s fixed, mobile, and pop-up vaccination operations.
Being on the front lines of pandemic relief in California during COVID-19, Heluna Health has proven that its organizational expertise is a vital resource for local and national efforts around pandemic preparedness. Collective approaches are key, and Heluna Health continues to build integrated and coordinated rapid relief responses that create positive community outcomes.
