As we near the end of Scotland’s eighth week in lockdown – and as measures are relaxed south of the border – how and when we will move out of lockdown of course raises a flurry of questions.

From hospitality and construction to routine health services, discussions are underway about how sectors will get as close as they can to a post-covid normality.

Asked about a ‘new normal’ in social care, Scottish Care’s Donald Macaskill says that reconnecting older and disabled people to their loved ones and society must be a priority:

“We need to not just try to reconnect people at the end of life, which is critical, but we need to start making those ordinary connections meaningful and purposeful again.

“This has to become the priority for policy makers, for frontline practitioners and in clinical guidance.

“It’s about getting the balance right between safety and quality of life. My concern increasingly is that we are sticking too rigidly with no professional flexibility to infection control procedures at the loss of the quality of life of people living with dementia and we need to get that balance right.”

Over 90,000 people in Scotland have dementia, a condition that can make dealing with much of the changes the pandemic has brought with it, such as social distancing, all the more frightening and harder to deal with.

Dr Macaskill added: “It’s hugely difficult territory to navigate and I think the key lesson here is that it’s not that one set of experts knows better than another – it’s that all of us – social care experts, experts in dementia, and experts in infection control need to work together because we can’t have people dying with in a sense what is a broken life but physically whole bodies.”

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