Adult social care - winter preparedness plan: 2020 to 2021

Introduction

The Plan is centred around four key principles:

• Learning from evidence to protect people who use social care support from the direct impact of COVID-19, and wider winter viruses.
• Ensuring that people have good physical and mental health and wellbeing, through provision of high quality integrated health and care services.
• Supporting the social care workforce to deliver safe support and care and to have positive mental health and wellbeing.
• Working in collaboration to plan and deliver high quality care.

Within these categories, the Plan provides specific guidance on a range of critical issues such as:

Enhanced Winter Measures

• Infection Prevention and Control
• Testing and vaccination
• Oversight Arrangements
• Workforce safety and support (PPE)
• Safety Huddle
• Hospital discharge
• Mental Health and wellbeing

New Winter Measures

• Staff Movement
• Introduction of Increased testing
• Outbreak Management Procedures
• New Funding
• Fair Work

The plan will be delivered through:

Communication, Cohesion & Collaboration ↔ Financial commitments ↔ Technology & Digital Support

An evidence paper is published alongside the plan to provide context and the rationale for our actions. It brings together national and international learning, including the recent publication from Public Health Scotland on discharges from hospital to care homes, and the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of four sample care homes, also published today.