We’d like to take this opportunity to reassure you of the measures we have taken at The Limes to ensure and safeguard the health and wellbeing of your loved one.

Access to Medical Professionals

The NHS Trust have allocated us a portable Television Medical Observations kit. This will allow our residence to still access Medical Clinicians and Healthcare Professionals when needed. We are working closely with St Helens surgery and whilst our usual weekly Doctors Round will now take place by video conference, Dr Briggs will be able to come out to us if we need her.

Staffing

We are very lucky at The Limes to have the most incredible caring, dedicated professional team. As you are aware the majority of our clients are extremely vulnerable to the Coronavirus so it is paramount that our staff are diligent in placing themselves into self-isolation at the slightest symptom. We have a number of staff “held back” so that they can step in when a colleague does have to self-isolate and we are confident that this will help us maintain our staffing levels.

Stock and Supplies

Preemptively, our staff took measures to ensure that there would be enough Personal Protective Equipment, such as gloves, aprons and masks to maintain infection control standards during this period. We are working closely with our suppliers to ensure that The Limes remains a priority client and that we are made aware should there be any delays or disruption in stock delivery.

Keeping in Contact

We now have two phone numbers which are dedicated for family which is 01983 219040 or 210006. As you can appreciate these lines are very busy. Please be mindful that we serve lunch at 1pm and supper at 5pm.

Skype has been a little bit more complicated and we are unsure of how well this will work. If you can send us your username and code and we can add to our contacts on Skype. At the present time it will be our activity team who will taking charge of the skype system so our care team can concentrate on care. Skype time will be booked with our activities team and therefore will only be available to facilitate these between 9.30am and 5pm. Please appreciate that it will take time for us to get to grip with using this and how best we can facilitate these around the home. The Limes is an old building and whilst we have boosted our signal there may be areas that are black spots. There will be a period of trial and error and we appreciate you patience as we get use to this. In the meantime we are exploring what other ways of communicating we can put in place. Feel free to email letters etc to your loved ones.

Some of you have purchased mobile phones and tablets for your loved ones to use during this period. We are working our way through getting these set up. We are fantastic carers, but we are a little behind the times with our IT skills, we will get there but your patience is appreciated!

Finally

Whilst, we appreciate that this a frightening and difficult time, we understand how hard this situation is, but please remember that our staff are working incredible hard and doing their very best in extremely difficult circumstances. To those of you who have offered your services, help and support to the staff team, I can’t tell you how much that has meant to them.

Kind regards,
Cathy, Myles and Alistair