It has been a very interesting few weeks when the whole nation was together in anticipation that football is coming home. Even the politicians got on the bandwagon. May I hasten to add, even those who did not know the finer points of football, the size of the pitch nor the rules, started wearing England shirts to gain popularity.
Disappointingly we lost and we all came back from “Sweet Caroline” to sweet reality, to show cracks in our society, scapegoating the weakest and most vulnerable of the team. This gave rise to many good people to defend the unfairness.
I directly relate this to our Covid-19 precautions and Care Management During COVID-19. For 16 months the media, the Government and every sector of society has been hammering on about how to keep the NHS safe, to protect the vulnerable in care homes and to fight Covid together. For publicity our Prime Minister came on primetime television to pronounce that we are back to freedom on the basis of vaccination, taking all the prestige for a successful campaign, despite not answering some key questions relevant to those people who have worked night and day in social care.
We are faced with questions such as
- Why are we not allowing all visitors to go into residents’ bedrooms now that Covid restrictions are over?
- Why are we restricting visits to only one or two people, why can’t the whole family come?
- It concerns me that the Government has not defined whether GPs will start coming to homes, and if not, why? The GPs are the same as frontline social care workers and they should be taking the same risk as we do.
- When can we have face to face appointments with GPs?
- Summer fetes, parties, as to how many people we can have together in such functions in a care home. It’s defined for pubs and nightclubs but not for care homes.
- Would the service users be able to use hospital agencies for e.g. X-rays as before?
Our view is there are many factors which haven’t been considered, nor consulted the frontline workers. There are lots of loose statements made but as yet we haven’t got many facts as to how we are going to operate from now on in care homes. Sadly all these unanswered questions are scapegoated like in football to our care home workers who have nothing to do with the cracks, but some people take it out on them. They take it on both cheeks and consider it part of the job. As they say, today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping.
