To families, whānau and friends,
As you will be aware, the whole country has moved to COVID-19 Alert Level 4 with the discovery of the highly contagious Delta variant in the community.
Firstly, for those of you who have family members and friends in our disability services, including IDEA Services and Choices NZ, I know that local managers will be contacting you to talk through the current situation and will keep you updated. This is an incredibly busy time for us so if we haven’t reached you yet – please feel free to call us.
I want to reassure you that we are moving quickly to reduce the risk to the people we support and our staff.
This means that we are again following Government guidelines and best practice and are reactivating processes and ways of working that were effective when we were previously at Alert Level 4.
We hope that the following responses are only required for a short time. However, we will monitor Government advice and keep you updated.
We will be working hard to keep bubbles as small as possible and will not be allowing visitors to our services.
The Ministry of Health now says that for disability residential care, family visits are not permitted, and there are no exemptions for end-of-life visits.
We know that this is hard for people and hope it will be temporary. We will be talking with the people we support about this and will support people to be connected via phone or online through tools such as WhatsApp. We know this doesn’t work for everyone and if it doesn’t work for you and you want to connect with a person in our services urgently, please talk to us.
We will continue to support those people who live in our residential services to get outside for fresh air but not to attend services where people gather.
Some people who live with family or other providers have been attending our day bases for some services. This is suspended while the ‘go home stay home’ instruction remains in place.
There will be no visits to properties except for urgent health and safety maintenance, using agreed protocols. Please go to the Accessible Properties website for contact information if you would like to get in touch.
Except for support workers, all other staff are working remotely but will still be available by email or phone.
Wecare.kiwi and Awhi-at-home are both continuing to operate so that families and individuals throughout New Zealand have access to support, connection and information.
We look forward to keeping you updated.
Please stay safe and take care.
Ralph Jones
IHC Group Chief Executive