Coronavirus


Covid-19 from the care home front line


The Care Home Environment editor Tim Probert speaks to Askham Village Community director Aliyyah-Begum Nasser about how the Cambridgeshire


establishment is managing the Covid-19 crisis


TCHE: How is the crisis affecting residents and staff at Askham Village Community?


Nasser: Askham is effectively five homes on one site. Each of the homes is independently registered with the Care Quality Commission and each has a different specialism: one is palliative care, one is dementia care, one is long- term neurological conditions, one is neurological rehab and one is complex neurology.


We have a lot of shared space, communal gardens, function rooms and so on where we bring residents together. Community is our philosophy, that you have specialist care but also have diversity of engagement with others. One of the big impacts of lockdown is each home is very much within its own way of working. Staff and residents aren’t moving between homes, visitors are no longer coming and there are no large gatherings on site. It’s a very different


feel, the community feel and buzz, which were always a big part of quality of life at Askham, aren’t there.


But I am really pleased that our staff have taken to the use of technology to enable residents stay in touch with their loved ones and to enable staff to stay in touch with each other, amazingly well. We have wanted to do this for many years but there was never the impetus before now.


In the past few weeks we have implemented many more Skype calls with relatives and more engagement between staff. We use a secure messaging system called Yapster - who have kindly let us use their platform at no cost - which is like WhatsApp but secure so we can share updates and policy changes with staff, and even resident situations in a private, protected way. Even with staff off for seven days, 14 days or even 12 weeks, they can still keep aware of what is going on. We can keep in touch with them, they are still part of the community. It’s been amazing and a really good thing to be able to do.


TCHE:Have many residents and staff been directly affected by the epidemic?


Nasser:We have, as yet, had no positive cases of Covid-19 within the population of


6


111 residents and 240 staff. We are running with around 10-12 per cent of staff off work mainly because of childcare or they themselves or their family members are vulnerable and need shielding. Some staff reported symptoms but many of them have also been able to return to work after their 7 or 14 day period off.


TCHE:How long do you expect this situation to last?


Nasser: I am working on the assumption that this is the new normal, so I am telling staff not to think of this as a four-week thing and then it’s done.


Our staff have been amazing at picking up shifts, but we need to make sure that this is sustainable because this could be the way we are for the next three or four months.


If staff pick up loads of shifts now, they will burn themselves out and then you’ve got other health issues to think about. We are working on the assumption we are in this for the long haul. It’s a different mindset.


TCHE: Care homes are under pressure to take people in who require more specialist care than what the home would normally provide. How is Askham responding?


www.thecarehomeenvironment.com • April 2020


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16