‘Resilient’ programme of social care needed to support NHS through winter
RESILIENT SOCIAL care will play a key role in supporting those who need it and helping the NHS in the coming months, councillors heard.
In-house council officers and a range of health and community sector partners were speaking to councillors at a special Rapid Review session of how health and social care services are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, hosted by Calderdale Council’s Adults, Health and Social Care Scrutiny Board.
The council’s Director of Adults Services and Wellbeing, Iain Baines, said it was a national requirement to be ready for winter and a winter plan sat alongside the existing system planning.
Mr Baines said the council had already provided well over two million pieces of PPE during the pandemic.
In the early months PPE demands nationally and internationally meant supplies of PPE were hard to get hold of.
But the council had secured new supply chains and this would be continued with local production a major element.
“It is critical to us. We have used a lot of local buisnesses and we intend to keep on,” he said.
The council will again open a retreat – premises it used earlier in the pandemic to provide a place where
Covid patients discharged from hospital who could not immediately be taken back by their homes could stay until they could return.
This was an important way of protecting care homes – since March Calderdale had seen 19 outbreaks of COVID-19 in 15 of the borough’s care homes – and hospitals.
Including those residents who had died in hopsital, at that point in time 56 residents of care homes in Calderdale had died where Covid had been a factor on the death certificate, said Mr Baines. The council was helping shielding residents, many through a hub which would be stepped up again.