December 2021

Dear Residents, Families, and Visitors

We hope you are all well and enjoying the holiday season, it’s great to see many of you visiting the homes, as family and friends have always been and continue to be essential to the well-being of our residents and relatives.

We are writing to you today to inform you of changes that affect us all regarding visitation and government guidance. Government guidance issued to protect residents from the Omicron variant restricts the number of named visitors able to visit a resident to three (this number does not include essential care givers or preschool age children). Every resident can choose to nominate an essential caregiver who can visit the home and help to attend to essential care needs.

Every resident should be supported to choose an essential care giver to benefit from companionship and additional care and support provided by someone with whom they have a personal relationship. Essential care givers do not count towards the limit of 3 visitors per resident. The respective home managers will engage with the essential care givers to provide testing procedure and information. Essential care givers should be allowed to continue to visit during periods of isolation or when there is an outbreak.

As per the government guidance residents who have received at least 2 doses of the vaccine, or are exempt from vaccination, should not have to isolate following most visits out of the care home but should take a lateral flow test every day for 10 days following the visit out.

We also continue to offer visits to friends or family members through arrangements such as outdoor visits, bedrooms, visiting pods, or from behind windows.

We continue with all the infection control prevention methods mentioned in previous letters and have a range of initiatives that we follow to ensure everything possible is done to keep everyone safe. Our staff have been absolutely outstanding during these unprecedented challenges, and our teams continue to strive for continuous improvement and continue to create an exceptional experience for our residents and families.

With Christmas around the corner, we have plenty of entertaining things for residents to enjoy including Christmas crafts and a great choice of daily activities. Over the passing weeks residents enjoyed the “Christmas Party at the Mill” for Christmas dinner and some shopping. Blackpool lights chippy night was an absolute success along with the “Puss in Boots” Pantomime show that our residents thoroughly enjoyed. The highly anticipated Windsor Fashion clothing party was a great success story re-creating a wonderful shopping experience for all our residents to appreciate. Lastly, on behalf of our care team and residents at Crown Care Homes we would like to thank two local schools; Sudell Primary school and Holy Trinity for providing Christmas cards to all our residents during these challenging times, we thank you for your commitment to support the community, and a cause we share.

We will continue to keep all of you in the loop every step of the way. Please feel free to contact our care teams at any time if you have any queries or concerns, and please continue to send your gratitude and thanks to info@crown-care.co.uk, and we will continue to do our best to respond as quickly as we can. We want to do anything we can to help you feel more at ease during this time.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and thank you for allowing us To Welcome, To Care, and To Serve our residents and their families.

Crown Care Homes Team