Coronavirus days part 3: The drumbeat of numbers

Numbers rule our new world.

Like many others, I’ve become depressingly addicted to the national statistics announcements each evening: How many new cases of Covid-19? How many spare ventilators are there? How much PPE have we managed to lay our hands on?

Increasingly our Dimensions Group numbers are informing our daily PERT team meetings. How many colleagues are off work? How many people we support are suspected to have Covid-19? How much PPE have we managed to lay our hands on? We’re trying really hard to establish our daily PPE usage so we know how many day’s supply we have left. This is incredibly difficult in our dispersed organisation.

Numbers are crucial. They underpin the restrictions we’re all living and working under (don’t get me started on people who don’t seem to understand that staying in saves lives) and our organisational response.

It is all too easy to think of the numbers and forget the cold reality. Take for example the four (to my knowledge) GP practices that wrote to the care providers they work alongside, asking for the vulnerable people in their charge to have ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ appended to all files, irrespective of individual capacity, preference or frailty. It was a truly shocking request. I was pleased to co-sign letters about this to the NHS this week, pleased with the response and pleased to share with you Dimensions’ own position statement on this topic.

Even in the best of times, hospital admission can be frightening for people with learning disabilities and / or autism and their families. Covid-19 means many families have gone from fearing the worst to expecting the worst. Every day families are making judgements around whether their loved one is more or less likely to die in hospital compared to at home. Of course it shouldn’t be like that but because it is, because hospitals are on a war footing, I am this week and next writing to the NHS and individual hospitals to ask for five reasonable adjustments:

• To establish a known point of contact for all patients who have a learning disability and/or autism – for example, a learning disability liaison nurse.
• To establish a clear policy and process around using resources such as Hospital Passports, information bands and booklets etc.
• To commit to an individual assessment regarding the appropriateness of admitting visitors to support individuals
• To allow people access to things that will help them to keep them calm and to be able to cope in hospitals.
• To continue to ensure easy read information is available.

You can find the letter here hospitals-reasonable adjustments letter. Please feel free to use and adapt for your own purposes. Please also make whatever use you wish of our new Covid-19 focused ‘Hospital Passport’ – find it here: covid hospital passport and visit our resources page for supplementary information.

Covid-19 has turned me into something of a letter writer. I’d like to say thank you to Asda, which has now explicitly included social care staff in its NHS opening hours, to Sainsbury’s which has just announced that it is removing buying limits so that care staff can shop for vulnerable people, and also to Aldi which my colleagues report is also prioritising care staff appropriately. M&S’ position – that care staff can shop at priority hours if they hold a CQC ID badge – is nothing short of mystifying. Readers of this blog will be well aware that no such thing exists for social care staff. Frankly, other major supermarkets continue to behave shamefully and we will not forget their behaviour when this ends.

Providers, all of whom are working flat-out to secure as much stock as possible, face a delicate balance between meeting the Public Health England best practice guidance and the stark reality that adhering to this guidance may keep colleagues safe in the very short term but could quickly lead to stock shortages, especially if colleagues act cautiously – and I certainly can’t and won’t blame my colleagues for that. My colleagues and I will continue to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to get what we need to keep our colleagues safe. Our guidance on how our colleagues should use PPE is published here PPE. I again invite other providers to make what use they can of our resources at this time.

In theory the UK should go through the peak of Covid-19 over the next week or so. It is a trying time and I would like to pay tribute to the commitment and courage of my magnificent colleagues, to the support we’re getting from our commissioners up and down the country, and to the collaborative approach taken by so many of our fellow providers. We’re getting through this together and whilst plonkers in parks might leave me screaming at my screen, they won’t derail us.