News

Dear friends, families and individuals

It’s great that today we recorded a much lower number of new cases of COVID-19 in the community.

Most of the country is now in Level 3 and that seems to bring a bit more hope to everyone.

To our Aucklanders still in Level 4, we are thinking of you and looking forward to you being in Level 3 too.

Actually, at Level 3, in our services things look the same as Level 4. We want to assure you that we are committed to health and safety and to minimising the risk of COVID-19 to everyone we support and our staff.

For many of you, we know you are very keen to see your loved ones.

At Level 4, we are unable to welcome visitors.

General guidance under Alert Level 3 is that you can extend your bubble to include other households if you can do so safely.

The MoH acknowledge that this is difficult for residential homes, which may already have extended their bubbles due to the numbers of residents and support workers.

Therefore, visitors must be allowed only where possible. There may be instances where visits may not be possible during Alert Level 3 due to difficulties in managing some of the health risks posed to residents and staff, therefore we will be continuing to ask visitors to contact their Service Manager to discuss visiting.

We are required to follow strict processes around visiting – and we want you to reassure you that we will be sticking to those strict criteria.

The Delta Covid-19 variant is highly transmissible and has made the process much more complex so the Ministry has suggested a range of questions that we will ask and we also have a number of requirements to meet.

Please:

• Get in touch with us first. We can’t accept visitors who just turn up at the door.
• Please let us know if there is an urgent reason or compassionate grounds we need to consider.
• Consider continuing to use the phone or the internet to stay in touch.

We are all looking forward to being able to spend more time with the people we love – and to getting out of lockdown!

Joan Cowan
Chief Operating Officer, Disability Services