A health and social care partnership is facing additional costs of just over £7m this year as a result of the covid pandemic.

Nearly half of the extra spending by Perth and Kinross Health and Social Care Partnership (PKHSCP) is expected to go to third party care providers to cover costs of PPE, staff sickness, extra recruitment and agency workers. 

A report presented last week to a meeting of the Integrated Joint Board, which oversees PKHSCP, says this figures is based on a “worst case scenario” and the forecast is likely to be revised “significantly downwards”.

But it adds: “However there remains significant challenges and uncertainty about the impact of covid-19 on care providers.”

Some smaller care at home agencies could go under due to the crisis as they face “astonishing” price rises for essentials such as PPE, it has been warned.

Perth and Kinross’s predicted additional costs as a result of the pandemic add up to £7.1m for 2020/21 – with £5.6m relating to social care and £1.5m relation to health services. It includes expenditure on extra care home capacity, loss of income, additional staffing costs and provision of increased mental health support.

PKHSCP said it has received an “initial allocation” of £1.4m in May from the Scottish Government to meet social care costs.

“The Scottish Government have provided assurance that this is an initial advance only whilst further work to ensure the robustness of costs is undertaken,” the report states.

Another report presented to the IJB notes pressure on acute hospital services has been “far less than feared” during the last three months as a result of measures such as lockdown and social distancing.

But it warns against complacency about the “devastating impact” of covid-19 and says the resilience of community services “continues to be tested”.

“The ‘flattening of the curve’ has had the effect of increasing the pandemic’s duration,” it says.

“So, rather than ‘coming out of covid’ anytime soon, it is now clear that we will be ‘living with covid’ for many months to come.

“This sets the backdrop for our current work within the HSCP, where we are continuing to respond to Covid-19 and its impact but adjusting to try to reinstate services that had been stood down in March and reorganise the delivery of services in the new operating environment.”

One example it gives is family members who have offered to provide care to elderly relatives because of concerns about carers coming into their home.

“Twelve weeks on this may be putting those arrangements under pressure and we need to think about supporting those carers and encouraging them to take up care at home support,” the report notes.

However it says there are now challenges around delivering support and respite through day care services in the context of  measures such as social distancing.

“Management teams within the HSCP are now actively considering and planning what services we can deliver, to whom, in what ways and with what safeguards, in the context of this ‘new normal,” it adds.

 

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