The province of the Eastern Cape is vast and inaccessible with literacy levels that fall below national average level and the prevalence of disease is very high, thus the need to have access to health facility services is imperative for the purposes of advancing the quality of life of the people of the Eastern Cape. The Eastern Cape population is 6,916,634 (36.6% urban and 3.4% rural) (Stats SA, 2001). South Africa has a high illiteracy rate of up to 15.1% (Stats SA, 2001), also there is varying rates of illiteracy between metropolitan (27%) and rural areas (50%).

The provision of Shared Contact Centre Services will ensure the social well-being, healthy living style of health customers. The actual purpose for Contact Centre provision was/is to optimise and revitalize Batho Pele Principles in order to ensure maximum accessibility of services delivered to all health customers in the Eastern Cape Province. It was also formed for the specific purpose of advertising, branding, media management, change management, public relations and event management on health related issues.

The aim of this initiative was for the department to realise its bottom objectives by providing value added services to the recipients as well as to bridge the gap between the health services and the communities that utilize the service. As everyone knows, it is a vicious cycle: if you are illiterate, you are unemployable, if you are unemployable, you won’t have an income and if you don’t have income, you are poor and won’t afford healthy food. This increases the chance of opportunistic diseases and you will require the services of the Contact Centre toll free line.

The Corporate Services Health Contact Centre Management unit of the Department of Health is mandated to expand its existing Contact Centre services to become a Shared Contact Centre one stop shop and a provincial central point for managing all queries of the department. This includes all Clinical, Human Resource and SCMU queries from the public with an advantage of economies of scale. The Shared Contact Centre is the face of the Eastern Cape Department of Health with regard to interfacing with the public on health customers’ complaints or queries.

The new mandate, as pronounced by then head of the Department of Health in 2009, was a means of strengthening audit intervention strategies put in place by ensuring that all queries from both internal and external customers are attended to and that progress is given within 72 hours as pronounced in the department’s service standards. The Contact Centre is a nerve centre of the department in that all data/complaints from the public through the Contact Centre are taken seriously in order to influence the strategic direction of the Eastern Cape Department of Health.

The Contact Centre is a tool that measures the satisfaction index of all health customers whether services rendered add value to citizens of the province or not.

In this vein, the Corporate Services Health Shared Contact Centre provides administrative support to all line programmes of the department and entities falling under the department’s responsibility and is also central to all departmental programmes. The core is to ensure the professional management of the frontline relations of the Eastern Cape Department of Health in an endeavor to uplift the corporate image of the department.