Senior officials have outlined the work undertaken by Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) to ensure it is prepared in the face of mounting pressure on the sector during the winter period.
The organisation drafted its plan for 2024/25 in a bid to ensure the resilience of critical services as temperatures drop at a challenging time of year.
This included setting out its key priorities – caring for all in the community, providing the right care in the right place at the right time, maximising capacity and supporting the workforce and unpaid carers – and assessing potential risks that could emerge.
Margaret Kerr, vice-chair of the integration joint board, the body responsible for oversight of the HSCP, asked officers at the meeting: “What I’m keen to understand and get a better sense of – we’re already in winter, it’s here, it’s been here for it feels like a couple of months already – how does it feel on the ground around workforce and the resilience within the workforce?
“How is that impacting flow of services already? We know that we’re very much in the middle of winter and it’s not likely to get much better for some time and there’s really no let-up in that.
“It’s just to get a sense of how do we feel these actions are actually impacting here and now?”
Pauline Robbie, interim head of health and social care, conceded there is “increased pressure” on the HSCP at this time of year. However, she added a “whole raft of work” has been carried out to make sure it is as prepared as possible – particularly on vaccination.
She explained: “If you think about the vaccination programme that started really, really early this year – [we] completed our housebound population by the end of November, our care home population, our highly vulnerable population, was done within three weeks in October.
“We’re trying to front load. If we think about vaccinations as well, we’re thinking about RSV, which is a new vaccination that was started this year for respiratory viruses, which people in the age of 74 to 79 are really quite susceptible too, as well as our younger population, our children and our babies.
“That’s all planned and moved forward. I suppose the hope at that point is that we see less impact. It’s not that people might not get flu, covid, RSV but being vaccinated and having quite a good uptake of that vaccination programme should help us manage that along with our workforce.
“We’ve been working really closely with our peer immunisation team, giving every opportunity we can for people who wish to be vaccinated to be able to achieve that without any challenge.”
Councillor Iain McMillan, a member of the board, described the work of the vaccination programme as “really important”. He said: “I think some people are starting to become a bit complacent because it’s maybe not so much highlighted in the media, covid’s not seen as what it was obviously at the height of the pandemic, so I think it’s important that we get the education right.”
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