How the Victorian government managed its hotel quarantine

In the past two years, Australians trying to get back home couldn’t escape the words hotel quarantine. The hotel quarantine system in Victoria was used from 2020 and removed at the end of 2021.

COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria is the Victorian Government agency responsible for managing international traveller quarantine during the pandemic.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Peter Tonkin, IT director of Covid-19 Quarantine Victoria (CQV), about the technical solutions he delivered to support this rapidly changing environment.

CQV stood up 15 hotels at their peak in order to run the intake of international travellers through their 14-day isolation and make sure they were looked after and cared for.

According to Tonkin, there were two core technology platforms that underpinned the CQV programme, the Dynamics platform, which is a Microsoft product, and ServiceNow. He said that the Victorian Government was already using Microsoft before establishing CQV.

“Historically, our CWS, which is our compliance welfare system, it was already entrenched and has already been developed as a CRM. Therefore, it was seen as a logical platform, given the speed with which we had to establish it because it was already there,” he said.

There's quite a big footprint across the Victorian government according to Tonkin and they have quite a number of deployments within the Victorian government.

“If you do things in a hurry and needed to stand something up fast, it helped you had a platform that was already well established. Therefore was more of an enhancement improvement, modification of that platform to meet the changing needs for the CQV and the different orders through the pandemic,” he explained.

ServiceNow was seen as a versatile platform, well established and highly utilised within government, according to Tonkin.

“It also helps for procurement cycles in order to bring a product in, it's already well established in government, because of all that pre-work that's been done to select those platforms. It means that you can bring it in a lot faster because it's been through a lot of rigour to get to that point, within a government environment,” he said.

While the hotel quarantine might have finished nearly a year ago, the CQV is still around.

“Quarantining is becoming less important, and that's fine. We still are running our VQ (Victorian quarantine) site out of Mickleham which is still part of our service in order to meet that requirement.

“There are still people who you need to quarantine who are unable to at home, or they’re visitors or the regional. There are certain reasons why they need to actually go to a facility and we've got one now and purpose-built for that reason,” he said.