‘Firstly, we would like to offer our sincere thanks to all of our staff for their continued support and commitment to each other and to our service users, who we know are extremely vulnerable during these continued, unprecedented and difficult times.
‘Care With Choices’ are taking guidance and all necessary precautions to help manage the risk of infection across our organisation, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. We continue to take the current circumstances very seriously and monitor the changing situation and government guidance closely. We also liaise with other bodies and local authorities in order to ensure we can provide a safe and efficient service, whilst keeping the health and safety of our service users, staff and other stakeholders, at the heart of our thoughts and plans. The ‘Optimo Group’ formed a ‘Business Continuity Team’, at the very beginning of the pandemic, which is made up of senior managers who meet on a regular basis (this has been up to twice per day, sometimes more and timeframes continue to be reviewed regularly), in order to discuss and update plans for the coming days, weeks and months.
Innovation and technology have supported us to ensure as many of our office-based staff as possible worked from home at the height of the pandemic and the organisation is now taking a more hybrid approach (in line with many businesses across the country), whilst infection control precautions continue to be adhered to and are of the utmost importance. We are also supporting our community staff and continue to keep everyone updated through our mobile-based communications system, providing information and updates regularly to ensure everyone is kept informed. It is important to stress that the safety of all of our service users, staff and other stakeholders is of paramount importance to us and we continue to monitor risk at all times.
To support infection control further, we also introduced our Smrt:Monitor App, where staff record their weekly COVID PCR tests and more, on a weekly basis.
We will continue to coordinate the services we provide locally and pledge to continue keeping our service users and staff well-informed and updated regularly, at what still remains, a challenging time. Please rest assured that our continuous aim is to provide responsible, well planned and safe services, whilst minimising risk to everyone involved.
We would urge everyone to continue following official government guidelines and advice, in order to prevent this period of uncertainty continuing for longer than it might. Please click on the Government link below, for information and advice to help people stay safe and to check out full details of their winter plan: https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus.
Our telephone lines continue to be open as usual, please find details here.’
