By Patricia Dearnaley, Head of Support and Employability at Rooftop Housing Group and HQN Associate

We began planning our COVID-19 response in mid-February, when our Disaster Management Team became aware that there was a potential issue with this little-known virus which still, at that point, seemed a long way off and possibly an overreaction.

To begin with, we felt that we were establishing contingency plans for something that we would probably never need to use, but wanted the assurance that we had mobilised sufficiently so that should we ever needed to put something concrete in place, we had at least outline plans as to how we were going to act.

As Head of Support, initially my main focus was purely on how we were going to manage the day to day health and wellbeing of customers across our approximately 700 young and older peoples’ services.

Ironically, one of the first questions I pondered was how we were going to support customers who were so concerned about the virus that they might all lock themselves away and get seriously sick without us knowing that they needed help – an issue that, with the benefit of hindsight, I could have saved time and brain power. But more on that in a later
post…

As a starting point, we drew on our existing local arrangements for risk management and adapted our risk assessments to what we knew. And adapted them again… And again… And again… As the situation unfolded, new challenges arose and new information became available, so our plans became fluid and agile in responding to new pressures.

Dependent on the type of service, we considered issues such as lettings, face to face contact with customers, food supplies for self-isolating customers, maintenance, hygiene, the management of communal areas, dealing with anti-social behaviour, and managing cross contamination.

What was apparent was that one overarching plan was not going to meet the needs of every service; each has its own local arrangements and peculiarities of design and location. So very early on, we concentrated on what became clear were the ‘straight pieces of the jigsaw’, or if you like, the major considerations that we needed to put into place.

We worked under three headings: ‘defensive’ action (ie, what were we going to stop doing?), ‘substitute action’ (what we going to put into place instead) and ‘preparatory action’ (what we needed to put in place to prepare for the new way of working). We also felt that we needed to establish different stages of escalation which were dependent on whether there was evidence of infection, when we would move from a reasonably light touch to something far more critical.

Once we had our initial contingency plans in place, we began to think wider about how our plans were going to interact with internal and external partners and collated a range of plans from other organisations with whom we are connected. Our care partners were proactive in
developing and sharing their plans and, where necessary, we made changes to our plans to align them with partners.

Across the wider organisation other heads of service have followed a similar approach and the Executive Team have driven the coordination of planning across teams and enabled access to resources to support our plans.

By the time that the offices closed on 16 March, we had fairly consistent plans in place that, though they have needed minor updates and escalation for some schemes, have stood the test of a developing situation. Mainly, we’ve just needed to add additional layers of detail to
make sure that all our colleagues take a consistent approach.

So, what have we learnt?

That there’s always a situation that isn’t covered by a contingency plan and requires additional decision making. That not all customers will always react rationally to measures that we assume they will see as eminently sensible.

That we are agile enough to change how we operate at 72 hours’ notice. That our front-line teams are creative, flexible and unfailingly
good humoured in the face of some tough challenges. And finally, that there are new ideas and ways of working that will make us stronger and more effective once we come out on the other side