Following the PM’s comments about care homes today, Jewish Care’s Director of Care Services, Gaby Wills has issued the following statement:

“Jewish Care has done everything possible to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in our care homes and protect and keep safe our residents and staff and we are pleased to report that we have had no new cases of infection across any of our 10 homes for over a month now. We took the early decision to go into lockdown across our homes more than a week before the national lockdown.

“We implemented and continue to follow a number of stringent measures and guidance in accordance with Public Health England and UK Government guidelines, including a screening process upon entry to any resource, self-isolation measures where appropriate, increased deep cleaning and use of additional sanitisation and specialist cleaning products and have suspended activity in our community centres. We have also invested in PPE. To date, we have procured more than 1.4 million items of PPE and continue to invest PPE for the future. We had previously suspended visits to our care homes and independent living facilities, which are now beginning to start again in outdoor spaces only under strict guidelines and only where they are considered safe to do so.

“We have started to admit people from the community into our homes over the last 3 weeks, and will only admit a person subject to them testing negative for Covid-19. Any new resident is also asked to isolate for the first 2 weeks of their stay, which will help us to continue to keep infection out of our homes. We have gone above and beyond to ensure that we not only follow outlined procedures, but taken additional precautions, which had we not done, the impact of the virus could have been much worse.”