Dec 2020
Latest update: 1 December
Update for friends and families
Thank you again for your patience while we work through the latest Government guidance following the second lockdown, and determine exactly what it means for care home residents and their families and loved ones.
All colleagues across The Orders of St John Care Trust are 100 per cent focussed on the importance of enabling visits, while keeping everybody who lives in, works at, or visits our care homes as safe as possible during the unprecedented challenge of the global COVID19 pandemic.
We are working with Government and research bodies to ensure that testing for visitors will be available soon and once the detail is received, we will review and update our visitor guidance accordingly.
From tomorrow, the England-wide lockdown will end, and the new tiered system will be introduced. The tiers have changed since before the lockdown, so we were unable to revert to previous procedures.
During lockdown we have been significantly progressing a project to install safe visitor rooms in all our homes. The majority of these have been inside the main building home, but where this has not been possible, we have installed specific visiting pods within the grounds or have a risk assessment in place. Many are being completed across our regions this week and the majority will have been completed by the end of next week.
There are two Tiers that are significant: the tier of the region where the home is situated and the tier of the region where the visitor lives or is travelling from. For example, if the visitor is in Tier 3 then the local rules apply which state: ‘You must not meet socially indoors with anybody you don’t live with. This includes private garden’.
We have assembled a chart to make this advice as straightforward as we can.
Christmas Visiting
We have also been examining the guidance for specific details on Christmas visiting and will publish an update by the end of the week.