It was reported earlier in the week that a cluster of cases had appeared at a residential care home, where 11 staff and 16 patients were affected, while yesterday it was announced that a second cluster at another care home had emerged, where 11 residents and two staff had been hit.
Director of Public Health Dr Nicola Brink did not play down the issue of keeping these homes, particularly the first one, staffed during the crisis: ‘It’s really challenging,’ she said.
‘What Health and Social Care have been doing is supporting it with some of their nurses going in, and I think it’s a case of all of us working together and working out where the need is. I think there shouldn’t be barriers. It’s us sorting this out, together, and I think that this is one of the things that has been so encouraging, that people have been saying “OK, where’s the need?” and people have been moving where the need is.
‘But it is obviously very challenging, when you have a significant number of members of staff ill, to actually provide the service we’d like to.’
States of Guernsey CEO Paul Whitfield said that a cell, or team, had been put together to work on a human resource development plan looking at a breadth of resources across the public sector and how these might be repurposed or redeployed. ‘We have today about 40% of our staff working on visible frontline services,’ he said.
Recently retired staff with key skills were also being looked at with a view to creating a bank or pool of staff who can be redistributed and redeployed. ‘We are really conscious that some of our key staff are quite likely to get the virus at some point and therefore we’ve got to be able to supplement [them].’
Some staff were being held back in order to ‘keep them clean’ so they can be deployed as needed.
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