Adult care homes: strengthening Health and Social Care Standards

Social isolation and loneliness can be extremely detrimental to a person's mental health causing severe distress. This mental ill health can lead to a lowering of the immune response and physical ailments.
I understand that in extreme circumstances like the Covid-19 pandemic that vulnerable people had to be protected through isolation, but this should not have continued for several months. Also, once vaccination and testing protections had to been added to the PPE protections the balance of risk shifted. Vulnerable people were then more at risk from the real mental ill health caused by enforced isolation compared the potential reduced risk of exposure to Covid-19.

There are already plenty of rules. Please don't keep adding new ones. There are existing standards that meet this need. An extra sentence to put a fuller context around 5.15 is all that is required.

Use 5.15 which currently states: If I am an adult living in a care home I can choose to see visitors in private and plan for a friend, family member or my partner to sometimes stay over.

Simply add a version of proposal d: If visiting restrictions are needed to prevent infection my named visitor (and substitutes) are supported by the service to continue to see and spend time with me.

Standards around visiting should be applied based on individual risk assessments. Broad implementation of rules does not always meet the needs of supported individuals. It cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.
Registered care homes have been a focus during Covid-19 because elderly people were more at risk of serious illness and death due to Covid. However, not all residents of care homes are elderly or have underlying health conditions that make them vulnerable. Many of those healthy adults with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, autism etc. were unfairly and unnecessarily isolated due to a "by the book" approach to protection. Care home providers were fearful of punitive action by Care Inspectorate if there were to be an outbreak. Similarly, many elderly people or people with underlying health conditions are not residents in care homes and the necessary restrictions on visiting that were implemented to protect them were not covered by Health Protection Teams or understood by families who wanted to visit.

It is always useful to have people's rights enshrined in law - it is clearer for us all, making it easier to enforce those rights or complain if they are not respected.

It will be the usual logistical challenge of updating a lot of paperwork out there, plus online portals and systems that have been set up with the existing standards. That will take time and money. There will be a communication challenge in making sure that people are aware of the changes.

The risk is that a named visitor uses the updated standard(s) to force a visit to a family member when it is clinically unsafe for that visit to happen. In a group living setting the impact of a visitor can be on the entire population rather than just on the person being visited.

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