We give staff a purchase order so they can go into NZ Safety Blackwoods to try them on and pick what they like - up to the value of $200. I know a few businesses who do exactly that.

If you require safety footwear, as others have mentioned, you cannot ask staff to pay for this or supply it. If they want something above the specified amount, they can pay the difference, though.

That summer school idea sounds awesome!

If they are a close contact, that impacts their pod. So, we need to ensure if they have been identified as a close contact, that they are not crossing into other pod areas but on their break alone, but will need to separate/group all the people who fall under that category to keep them away from the non-close contacts. Just the rostering for this will be a nightmare I imagine. A lot of our staff do not have a car or do not drive to work themselves, so we had to veto the car idea early on.

Yes close contact scheme is correct. We were initially declined first attempt to register as a critical service. So, we have had to go back and do it again. Seemingly the process was different this time and we were given acceptance. It is a little mind boggling we were ever declined as without us, 8 DHB's cannot operate safely.

Now that we are confirmed as being a critical service, we can look at access options for RAT. However, we have staff at 8 different sites (all DHB locations) as well as an onsite location, so for some of them, they will be piggy backing on the process that the DHB they work at has decided on, some offsite staff will need to be sent tests (where the DHB has not confirmed that we can be included), and our onsite staff will have to be a different process again that is managed by us. Certainly makes for a challenging time trying to monitor all of that.

Agreed, we have a particularly challenging environment. Even explaining how to do a screenshot has been beyond a lot of people's abilities. We also realized how many people either don't have an email / have no idea how to use it, or simply have no credit/data to even call or send text messages. Definitely won't be easy to find a one-size fits all solution, that's for sure!

Hey thank you for your reply. We are trying to avoid using the My Covid Record if we can, as simply getting evidence of vaccines has proven challenging for quite a few of our staff (we have had to set many staff members logins up for them and arrange their passes) so are hoping to utilize a database that we can have a bit more oversight/management/set up of.