Care HomesNews

Shropshire Care Home Offers Skype Calls For Residents Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

A Shropshire care home has been helping residents stay in touch with loved ones through video calling apps.

Cloverfields Residential Care Home and Nursing Home in Whitchurch has been using Skype to allow residents to speak face to face with their families.

The COVID-19 outbreak meant the 34-bed care home, part of the Safe Harbor group, had to close its doors to visitors.

Joan Crump, 69, Whitchurch, whose mum Dorothy Williams, 87, is staying at the care home, said: “I’d like to thank all the fantastic staff at Cloverfields for the care and commitment to their job at all times, but especially now when the country is in a difficult and scary place!

“Mother’s Day was made as special as possible for the resident mums in there, especially since they installed Skype so that I could talk to Mum safely. It was a lovely gesture.

“Along with millions of others, I can’t wait for life to return to normal, but in the meantime let’s all keep as safe and cheerful as possible.”

Care home manager Jen Austin said: “Sometimes it really helps to see a familiar face, and we could all use that right now. Irene was a bit confused as to why she could see her family and their dogs on a small screen in front of her, but then she quite enjoyed being able to chat with them. It also gives relatives better peace of mind being able to actually see with their own eyes that their loved ones are being well looked after.”

Expanding the Use of the Nightingale in London Makes Perfect Sense says NHS Confederation

Responding to the leaked letter in the Health Service Journal about consideration being given to increasing the number of patients cared for in the Nightingale London site, including to restore routine services, Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said:

“Expanding the use of the Nightingale in London makes perfect sense. The challenge the NHS will face as the peak of the virus is reached will be to restore care and treatment to many patients who have been denied support while the system geared up to cope with this crisis.

“Make no mistake, the NHS has moved mountains and developed a level of service everyone said would be impossible. Now over the next few weeks it will have to start moving towards a different approach. It will need to keep a good level of service for COVID-19 patients, have the ability to flex again in case there is another surge, and at the same time start to manage the huge unmet demand the emergency has caused. Using Nightingale capacity for COVID-19 patients is one way to do this and allow hospitals to start re-establishing some services that have been curtained or stopped.

“It will be vital that we do not return to normal business as there have been countless innovations and new ways of working that leaders of the NHS are determined to retain and build on, including remote consultations, new cross working between teams, collaboration with social care and much else. These remarkable changes that might have taken years have been achieved in days – not only in hospitals but also in mental health, GP and community services.

“As one leader put it, we’re not going back to normal, we must embrace a new and very different future.”

 

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