Staying connected one year on in the COVID-19 pandemic
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Healthwatch Brighton and Hove, Healthwatch East Sussex and Healthwatch West Sussex undertook a webinar on relative and provider perspectives of visiting restrictions on 9 November 2021. The event was attended by 40 people.
The discussion covered the following issues:
- Mandatory vaccination for care home staff
- Visiting procedures and the impact on relatives and residents of visiting restrictions
- Essential caregiver process
- Care home staffing shortages.
The vital need for collaborative relationships between care home providers and relatives is a cross-cutting theme of this event. These collaborative relationships contribute towards a good model of shared care in the best interests of people living in care homes. All care homes should enable relatives to be assigned essential caregiver status, as is stated in the statutory guidance regarding visiting. This of course benefits individual residents, but also the care home workforce during these times of significant staff shortages.