The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has released new guidance on care home visiting that allows each resident to have one regular indoor visitor.
The guidance, which will be in force from 8 March, replaces previous guidance on visiting and applies to care homes for working age and for older adults.
“Visiting is a central part of care home life. It is crucially important for maintaining the health, wellbeing and quality of life of residents,” DHSC said.
“Visiting is also vital for family and friends to maintain contact and life-long relationships with their loved ones and contribute to their support and care,” it added.
The guidance allows every care home resident to nominate a single named visitor who will be able to enter the care home for regular visits.
Those visitors should be tested using rapid lateral flow tests before every visit and must wear appropriate PPE, as well as follow all other infection control measures instigated by individual care homes.
Visitors and residents are advised to keep physical contact to a minimum. Visitors and residents can hold hands – while bearing in mind the increased the risk of transmission – but close physical contact such as hugging is barred.
In addition, residents with the highest care needs are able to nominate an essential care giver.
Care homes can continue to offer visits to other friends or family members with arrangements such as outdoor visiting, substantial screens, visiting pods or behind windows.
The National Care Forum backed the guidance as an “important first step towards the resumption of meaningful visits for all” but said care providers will continue to need support to implement it.
“It is reliant on government sustaining free PPE, ongoing access to testing and to recognising the additional costs to care homes in managing the complexities of safe visiting within a pandemic,” said chief executive Vic Rayner.
“It is of huge concern that at the same time that the government is relaunching visiting, it has missed the opportunity within the budget to provide assurance that the emergency funding for testing and visiting will be extended beyond the end of March 2021,” she added.
“If the notion of an irreversible step forward in enabling visiting is to be believed, then the government must also put forward an irreversible commitment to resource it.”
