Community / Care sector under ‘sustained pressure’ but no crisis
THE LOCAL care service provision has reached a critical point as resources are being directed towards highest risk areas.
The council’s director of community health and social care, Brian Chittick, said on Tuesday that the care sector in the isles was experiencing “significant pressures” but insisted that it was not at crisis point.
As managers have moved to what is called ‘business continuity mode’, Chittick and his team have enacted a number of measures to alleviate the pressures on the care sector.
In a short statement issued earlier today, Shetland Islands Council said care centres and services were stretched to capacity.
This, Chittick said, was due to a “perfect storm” of rising demand, Covid illness, recruitment problems and people on leave during the summer holidays.
The statement went on to say that the pressures on services were worse than during the height of the Covid pandemic.
Speaking to Shetland News later in the day the social care director said that by enacting ‘business continuity mode’, managers were working to “prioritise our resource to sustain our services”.
This involved increasing the department’s workforce pool by deploying staff from other areas within the sector but also from across the whole council.
He added: “We are looking at very focused recruitment of carers, trying to get them into the system as quickly as possible.
“These are some of the examples where we are prioritising time and resource to unblock some of the constraints that we have been working with.”
Chittick added that the council had not experienced such a “sustained pressure on services” before but was unable to give any figures as to how many posts across the community health and social care department were currently vacant and difficult to fill.
Asked if people will get access to care homes or care packages as and when they need to, he said there might be a slight wait, and this is why he is asking the community for its support and understanding.
“We stretched to capacity at the moment, we are looking at how we can expand our capacity to meet demand,” Chittick said.
Asked if the service was at crisis point, the community health and social care director said that in his mind ‘crisis’ was “too strong a word.”
“These are system pressures,” he said. “We are no different than any other system across the UK at the moment with the pressures on health and social care.
“It is just sustained pressure on our services that we are managing with a move to enacting one of our business continuity plans; that would not be different had we pressures during the winter.
“It is an operational management plan; it is not as though we are in crisis, we are just managing the pressure that is on the services.”
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