Our priority here at Pearlcare will always be the safe and wellbeing of our residents, their visitors and our staff.
Since the early stages of the pandemic, Pearlcare quickly assembled the ‘crisis team’ who sprung into action immediately to protect our residents and staff. This resulted in almost all our homes remaining Covid-19 free throughout the first lockdown and even now as we are in the second the wave our homes continue to keep the virus at bay.
We understand that choosing a care home for yourself or your loved one during a pandemic can be difficult as we all navigate into the unknown. Here at Pearlcare, we want to ensure you feel you have all the information at hand so below are the steps we currently follow throughout all of our homes:
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
- Throughout the pandemic all of our homes have maintained a sufficient supply of PPE, to ensure they can safely look after our residents
- All staff wear face masks at all times, they may also (depending on the task) wear gloves, aprons, and face visors over their masks
Vaccination rollout
- All our care home residents and staff across the sixteen care home have been offered the vaccination and this ensures that we have a extra layer of protection in place to held keep the virus at bay.
Safe visiting options
- Maintaining contact with loves ones has been a priority since the start of the pandemic and this will continue
- Our visiting options are reviewed continuously and are different to every home across the Pearlcare Group depending on local restrictions and government guidelines which we monitor very carefully
- Visiting options in our homes (different depending on the home) includes: dedicated visiting rooms with screens, custom built visiting pods, closed window visit and video calls
Staff continue to receive full training and continuous communication to ensure safety
- All staff undertake a thorough induction and receive additional training in Infection Control
- Covid-19 information and updates are shared with our homes managers which is passed onto all members of staff, on a weekly, and sometimes daily basis. All of this is placed on the companies online ‘bookshelf’ which all staff have continued access too.
- Our Crisis Management Team ensure the latest practices and guidance are adhered to at the highest level, under critical observation
- Staff are updated regularly on the best and most effective way to use PPE to keep everyone as safe as possible
Entire home testing programme
- To ensure everyones protection and safety we participate in the Government-led Covid-19 testing programme throughout all of our homes, where residents are tested on a 28-day cycle and staff are tested weekly
- A state of the art electronic temperature gauge machine that checks the temperature of all persons entering and leaving the building, the machine will alert the manager if anyone has a reading which flags a concern and thus does not allow them to access into the building. The machine also has facial recognition so it can remotely check that persons entering the building are appropriately wearing a face mask and again will alert the manager is this is not the case
Deep cleaning and infection control processes
- A state of the art decontamination machine that kills 99% of virus particles and bacteria, this machine compliments the robust cleaning schedule we have in place to ensure we significantly reduce down any transmission in high volume areas and high risk areas within the home.
- We have a strict infection control procedures that all our staff are trained to undertake