How we kept our clients and carers safe against Coronavirus!
So far we have managed to keep all our carers and clients safe against Coronavirus. At the same time, Care & Carers has grown safely and consistently throughout the pandemic. I will explain below 7 factors that have contributed to achieving these excellent results.
1) PPE: The scale of pandemic was enormous globally. Governments, companies, and the public were in shock across the world. Many watched the scenes from other parts of the world not realising that the virus will soon disrupt their own way of life. We acted well in advance and sourced enough PPE in the very beginning, we were even able to support two other care companies and give them some of our stock. More importantly we did not wait for the government guidelines around PPE and provided our carers with sufficient PPE and asked them to wear full PPE from very beginning.
2) Communication: We immediately started sharing reliable sources of information among our team and dealt with misinformation swiftly. Staff were encouraged to rely on reliable sources only and raise questions within our team if they have any doubts. Through our Care Management App, Careberry Software, Carers received an alert every time they logged in their app reminding them to stay at home if they demonstrated any symptoms.
3) Zero Tolerance: Right from the beginning we insisted on taking hospital discharge only after a negative test result. Early during pandemic, we had a 94-year-old client who was about to be discharged from hospital. Upon our insistence the hospital did a test, and it came as positive. When taking hospital discharges with coronavirus we have planned very carefully and covered the visits by only a limited number of carers and allocated them enough time between the visits so they could disinfect properly.
4) Coronavirus Infection Control Trainer: We quickly realised we need to retrain our carers with the new information around Infection Control and PPE. We provided one of our carers with the relevant training to teach others and arranged her to safely carry out sessions with the whole team. While observing social distancing rules it was a challenge, but within 2 weeks all our carers were adequately trained.
5) Working with Clients and Families: We communicated regularly with our clients and their families regarding the challenges that we are facing and asked them for help. They have been excellent, and we are thankful for their ongoing support. If a client or a family refused to help or jeopardized our efforts, we decided to act accordingly. One family refused to follow the government guidelines and ignored our advice, even after we explained the risk was also posed to the carers. We quickly informed relevant authorities and gave them notice to protect our carers and other clients.
6) Swift action: When required we have taken swift action without leaving things to chance. On one occasion, we removed 3 members of staff from their visits while they were in the field due to school contacting them regarding the possibility of their children having Covid-19. Our hard working team of carers are always quick to help and support their team members as we all understand the seriousness of this virus.
7) Innovative Care Management Platform: Our award-winning care management platform, Careberry, has enabled our back office team to work remotely, update care plans in real time, send instructions to our carers immediately, communicate with staff and families and more importantly keep recruiting safely throughout the pandemic. Our platform along with the actions that we have taken helped us to keep our staff and clients safe and avoid having any missed visit or cancellations during pandemic.
We are forever grateful to our staff for their ongoing support when things got tough! They kept going and supported each other in every aspect possible! The fact that we have managed to avoid any cancellation or missed visit is a credit to them!
