Dec 2020
Latest update: 2 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 (OSJCT) 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.
Testing for visitors to care homes
We are aware that mass testing for potential care home visitors has been announced by the Government. This new test is known as a Lateral Flow Test and results can be known within 30 minutes. As with any test it will not completely remove the risk of contracting or transmitting COVID-19. OSJCT welcomes any opportunity to bring our residents and their loved ones more contact after what has been a very difficult nine months for everybody.
However, we must make sure that all processes and checks are in place before rolling out this testing procedure. The first stage of that is to contact all our Local Authorities/Public Health colleagues in areas where we have care homes to ensure that they support this new testing. We will update on the progress of this testing as soon as we can as in tandem we are evaluating the impact on our homes to be able to undertake the volume of testing and risk assessments to implement the guidance.
From today, 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 elements of the 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 table 'Visiting in Care Homes - Guidance in the Absence of Visitor Testing' to make this advice as straightforward as we can, see below or click here to open in a new window.
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.
We would like to thank you again for your patience, understanding and support during these incredibly different times. Everything we do is carried out with the welfare of residents, their families, and colleagues as our main priority and working with you to help steer a course through these challenges is hugely appreciate by everyone at the OSJCT family.