COVID-19: care home resilience plan

This page sets out our arrangements for supporting care home settings across the borough of Rochdale during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How we're supporting care homes

In 2020 the government asked all local authorities to publish what we are doing to support care home settings, particularly those for older adults, and people living with dementia.  This is in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the government providing additional funding to local authorities to help meet the increased demand for adult social care and to provide additional support to social care providers.

We are working hard to support care homes and other care providers during the coronavirus pandemic. Most of this support is provided by our commissioning service and Quality Assurance Team.

Our approach to supporting care homes is based on our core values of pioneering, passionate, proud and open.

View letters and plan for supporting care homes

Our support plan for care home providers

In 2020 the DHSC asked us to create a Care Home Resilience Plan to outline how we intend to use the funding.

View our Care Home Resilience Plan documents

Grants

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we've received the following grants from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to support local care providers in Rochdale borough.

Grant Value received (£ millions)
Infection Grant 1 2.2
Infection Control Grant 2​ 2.0
Rapid Testing Grant 0.5
Workforce Capacity Grant 0.5
Infection Control Grant 3 0.8
Rapid Testing Grant 2 0.6
Infection Control Grant 4 0.5
Rapid Testing Grant 3 0.4
Total ​7.5

Additional financial support for care homes

We gave an additional upfront payment to care homes in April 2020 which was equivalent to a standard weekly payment.

This additional financial support has allowed care homes to:

  • Give sick pay to front line workers. 
  • Hire additional staff to cover absences.
  • Fund coronavirus related spending such as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). We provided care homes with a Pro-forma document to help them identify and keep track of their coronavirus spending.

We also gave additional funding to any care homes that had to close due to a COVID-19 breakout. The funding was to cover income care homes lost during the closure.

Support to providers we have contracts with

The total spent as of 31 May 2021 supporting providers we have contracts with in response to COVID-19 is £1.3 million.

The following shows the support we're offering.

Domiciliary care support:

  • ​Upfront payment to Adult Social Care (ASC) providers to support COVID-19 costs including staff sickness or isolation, additional staffing requirements, PPE and other related costs.
  • Payment on assessed hours.
  • Procurement and provision of PPE.

Residential and nursing care support:

  • Upfront payment to Adult Social Care (ASC) providers to support COVID-19 costs including staff sickness or isolation, additional staffing requirements, PPE and other related costs.
  • Payment on assessed hours.
  • Procurement and provision of PPE
  • Under occupancy payments up to 90% were closed by Infection Control.

Other provision:

  • Upfront payment to Adult Social Care (ASC) providers to support COVID-19 costs including staff sickness or isolation, additional staffing requirements, PPE and other related costs.
  • ​Payment on assessed hours.
  • Procurement and provision of PPE.

Support to providers we don't have contracts with

The total spent as of 31 May 2021 supporting providers we don't have contracts with in response to COVID-19 is £0. 

The following shows the support we're offering.

Domiciliary care support:

  • Procurement and provision of PPE.

Residential or nursing care support:

  • Procurement and provision of PPE.

Other provision:

  • Procurement and provision of PPE.

Keeping care homes updated

During this pandemic, we've made it a priority to communicate regularly with care homes.

We've communicated with care homes by: 

  • Sending briefings to care homes to help keep them updated on government guidance and local initiatives.
  • Holding regular virtual meetings with professionals from the Northern Care Alliance, Primary Care, Public Health and Commissioning Team. This allows care home staff to get updates from these organisations directly and get answers to questions on issues like Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), swab testing, hospital discharges and finances.
  • Sending bulletins detailing key information to care homes.
  • Speaking to care services over the phone every day to find out what the front line issues are. The focus has been on PPE, assisting with the set-up of the Virtual Hospital arrangements, supporting homes with the capacity tracker and reporting on staffing situations. ​

Providing safeguarding and PPE training

Our quality assurance team held some safeguarding training for care home workers covering COVID-19 safeguarding concerns.

We also worked with The Northern Care Alliance to hold PPE training for care workers which covered all aspects of infection control. We're holding these PPE training sessions regularly to train new members of staff and update existing workers on any guidance changes.

Future plans to support care homes

Here are some of our plans to further support care homes in the future.

  • Nursing staff supervision: we hope to create supervision for registered nurses. This is where a care home nurse can meet with one of our adult safeguarding professionals alone. This would give the nurse a safe place to discuss any issues they have or reflect on their performance and career goals.
  • Support for none nursing staff: after we create the nursing staff supervision, we would like to create something similar for care home staff who aren't in nursing roles.
  • Sepsis training: before the coronavirus outbreak, we planned to offer training to care home staff on how to identify the early signs of sepsis. We had to put this on hold due to COVID-19 but we hope to begin delivering this training soon.

We will continue to review and update this page with new developments and changes to support arrangements.