Why PPE is vital for a care home

Over the past few months, Bradbury Wing has gone from a free, happy environment to somewhere quite restricted. We’ve had to isolate our residents because if they contract the virus they would be at considerable risk. 

The importance of PPE

Everyone wears PPE and practices social distancing. PPE has a dual role - it’s helping protect our vulnerable residents, but it’s also giving our staff members courage and strength to come to work, knowing they are protected.

Things have changed in that our leisure activities in the home have stopped. We’ve had reduced staffing numbers because some staff were poorly themselves. We’ve been on emergency numbers but still providing high standards of care to our customers. They’re missing out on the niceties if you like, some of the individual interaction we usually want to give to them. 

Keeping our residents connected

Visitors are prevented at the moment, but we try and keep everyone in touch with their loved ones. We can’t use much assistive technology because most of our residents are high needs. We’re a brain injury unit so we’re keeping people in touch over the phone or Skype where families can see that they’re being well looked after. 

Some of our residents can’t fully understand the concept of illness and protection. One lady who’s able to understand a certain amount and loves to be involved with anything that’s going on in the service, picked up bits from the TV, thinking that people were going to stop her if she came out of her bedroom. Now we’ve encouraged her to come out, and she enjoys coming to spend some time in the garden.

Protecting our staff

Staff are rallying round, they’re absolutely amazing, they’re trying to be happy and upbeat when they’re on shift. Obviously, when we’ve had deaths people were down. We had a lot of staff off and four of our residents were poorly and there was a lot of worry and concern. This is eased by the fact that we now have proper PPE and safe shields - this is security to them. 

Thank you for those that have supported us to date, we’re continuing to use a lot of PPE daily and it’s vital to our work. It’s crucial to keep us and our customers safe – people we’ve cared for over many years. We want them to remain healthy together - it’s vital for their safety and their mental health as well.