Lucy Pilliner, Business Manager at Katherine Harriet Ltd looks back at a ‘year of change’ as we enter the third stage of the ‘Lockdown Roadmap’ and a new normal begins.
Lucy commented: “During these very uncertain times we have continued to provide high quality care to keep everyone safe. This includes the WBAs, us, our Clients, and families. We are very proud to say only 3 WBAs had the virus however this did not affect any of our Clients, this has a huge reflection on our staff and the strict regime they maintained to stop the spread of the virus. 95% of our WBAs remained free from Covid-19 and 100% of our Clients did not become a prisoner to this horrid virus. This to us is a huge Testimony to our team”.
HOW DID WE DO IT?
KH ensured training was continued over zoom to ensure staff kept their knowledge up to date and had the responsibility of ensuring we had a very accurate Covid and Infection Control Risk Assessment. The assessments were carried out prior to visiting new clients and protecting our regular Clients. We maintained a good stock of PPE preparing and delivering PPE boxes to our WBAS along with Infection Control videos DO’s and DON’T’s. Staff ensured that PPE was worn at all times even prior to entering Clients homes, strict regime of Donning, Doffing, and maintaining thorough hand washing was paramount.
The office ensured that staff were contacted on a regular basis to make sure they were ok, that we were here for them and they were not alone. Rotas were looked at to ensure we could limit the footfall where reasonably possible preventing further spread of the viruses. Promoting Mental Health was a huge part of keeping our staff safe. Fatigue was just one of the many things that we suffered during working through Covid and ensuring staff had a good network of support and ensuring regular breaks were taken. This was paramount in maintaining healthy staff.
Our staff might be HEROS, but they were not superhuman and needed protecting from exhaustion.
Responsibility, even though we have plenty in the world of being a carer- during Covid this increased hugely. A responsibility to keep everyone safe not just themselves and their families but clients and their families and not taking you eye off the ball ensuring that everything you did was done with care, respect, and dignity knowing that when you walked out of that door you could not have done any more and that knowing your best was good enough.
Arrangements were in place to be able to respond to any alerts and a Manager was always on call ensuring we could respond and support where required. KH have also discussed in detail the importance of staff having their vaccination and to protect ourselves and our clients.
We have made vaccinations mandatory and updated our policies to reflect this.
We know we are not out of the woods yet and we will continue to follow strict protocol for the foreseeable.
Our staff are all HEROES and continue to go above and beyond to ensure we strive to deliver quality care every day.
Lucy Pilliner – Business Manager
