Care homes
Hope for ‘meaningful’ visiting
HOPE is growing that new plans for care home visiting will allow “meaningful contact” between residents and their loved ones.
Glaswegian campaigner Cathie Russell said she was confident families would have a better experience.
She set up the Care Home Relatives Scotland Facebook group in August last year amid frustration over rules she says were “worse than prison visiting”. The Scottish Government is to publish fresh guidance today as part of its road map out of lockdown.
A CAMPAIGNER who describes cuts to care home visiting during the pandemic as a “human rights disaster” says she is confident that “meaningful contact” will resume this time.
Cathie Russell, from Glasgow, set up the Care Home Relatives Scotland Facebook group in August last year amid growing frustration among relatives over rules that she says were “worse than prison visiting”. The group now has some 1,800 members.
The Scottish Government is set to publish guidance today which will pave the way to “safe indoor visiting” from early March, with its roadmap out of lockdown promising to “maximise meaningful contact between residents and their loved ones”. Ms Russell, a retired council communications manager whose 89-year-old mother has been in a care home since 2019, said relatives have previously felt care homes delayed opening even when allowed to do so amid fears of new outbreaks.
She said: “I think it will be better than last time. I feel the care homes themselves were extremely reluctant to let anyone in.
“Even when visiting could have been allowed, they were dragging things out until it wasn’t. We did a big survey when the October 12 guidance came in and only 10 per cent of people in our group got anything approaching what that guidance would have allowed.”
Along with co-founders of the Facebook group, Ms Russell has been working with infection control consultants, KS Healthcare, to create a step-by-step picture guide for visitors – published on the Facebook group yesterday – on how to visit loved ones safely in their room in care homes, or to take them out for a drive.
Ms Russell said: “It sets out exactly what steps you need to take to keep everything safe – what needs cleaned and so on – so that people can switch their mindset to thinking all the time about infection control, and really to build confidence with the care homes as well, that residents’ relatives are as enthusiastic as they are to keep everything as safe as it can be.”
Since the beginning of January, 535 care home residents have died with Covid in Scotland – 23 per cent of the total this year – but vaccination now appears to be cutting mortality substantially.
However, Ms Russell questions what would have happened without the immunisation programme and stresses that families do not want to go backwards.
She added: “We really believe that the route to opening care home doors all along was infection prevention and control and PPE and people doing that in a really careful and consistent way, like they have in Europe.”
In France, visits to relatives in nursing homes have been allowed since April with stringent conditions, while in Germany and the Netherlands care homes have enabled residents to meet with relatives by turning garden sheds or telephone boxes in their grounds into “visiting pods”.
It came as Holyrood’s Health and Sport Committee heard feedback from social care experts on the recent independent review on the future of social care in Scotland, which recommended increased involvement for carers and families in the planning and delivery of services.
Cassie Hersee, manager of Isle View Nursing Home in Aultbea, Wester Ross, said some of their residents were admitted prematurely because people in rural areas “don’t have a choice”.
She said: “A lot of them perhaps don’t need to be here as early as they are. They could have been cared for in the community, if we had those dementia specialists on the ground going in supporting families.”
Annie Gunner Logan, of the Coalition of Care and Support Providers, said public understanding of the sector is “critical”. She said: “You can’t get involved if you don’t understand what it is, or its complexities.”