Harvest Healthcare recognises that both essential testing such as LOLERs and equipment repairs must continue in order to protect vulnerable residents.

To make sure that this essential work can continue as safely and seamlessly as possible, please see these top tips for a Harvest Healthcare engineer visit.

Top Tips:

• If the equipment to be looked at can be moved out of bedrooms/bathrooms/communal spaces please do this in advance of our engineer arriving.
• Our engineer will wipe down any equipment they touch with disinfection wipes after they are finished. Despite this, we recommend following your own in-house disinfection protocols as a secondary measure.
• Our engineer will thoroughly wash their hands following strict washing protocols between homes and will always wear gloves during site visits. Please follow social distancing measures as much as possible while our engineers are on site to support these risk reduction measures.
• If equipment can be serviced/repaired outside the building our engineers are happy to do this. Please place the equipment on a secure, flat, dry surface to maintain engineer safety and decontaminate any equipment before taking it outside.
• If you have any concerns about the risks posed by a site visit, please contact Harvest Healthcare in advance of your scheduled visit to discuss the safest arrangement to protect staff and residents. We are happy to support the needs of individual homes in order to undertake essential work.

In order to deal with the rapidly changing situation in the UK and across the world, we are reinforcing and keeping measures to ensure that we are able to continue to provide our high-quality services, whilst also protecting our customers, staff, other stakeholders and suppliers.
As well as reinforcing good hygiene practices throughout the company, we are taking the following measures:

• Our business remains open but we do have a larger number of staff working from home now in line with the government advice on social distancing and working from home where possible.
• We are running health check for all our field-based staff regularly. Any staff with the flu-like symptoms will be asked to self-isolate following the government advice.

And as we stated before,

• There will be no business-related travel to hot-spot areas, and any staff returning from holidays there will be assessed before returning to work.
• We are actively working with suppliers based in hot-spot areas to ensure continuity of supply, which has so far proved effective. We are also assured by the authorities that there is no health risk from imported goods from hot spot areas due to the nature of transmission of the virus.

We are closely monitoring updates regarding the virus and will keep in line with any change in government advice.

In order to deal with the rapidly changing situation in the UK and across the world, we have put in place measures to ensure that we are able to continue to provide our usual high-quality services, whilst also protecting our customers, staff, other stakeholders and suppliers.

At the time of writing, we have no concerns about an outbreak occurring at our offices, and we have had no confirmed or suspected cases amongst any of our people.  However, it is important that we are fully prepared in case the situation in the UK gets worse.  As well as reinforcing good hygiene practices throughout the company, we have taken the following measures:

• We have ensured that our office-based staff can work remotely from home if needed. Our offices are open to visitors; however we are constantly monitoring this and will update our policy should the situation change.
• We have asked all our field-based staff to immediately report any flu-like symptoms, and where appropriate we will send them home.
• There will be no business-related travel to hot-spot areas, and any staff returning from holidays there will be assessed before returning to work.
• We are actively working with suppliers based in hot-spot areas to ensure continuity of supply, which has so far proved effective.  We are also assured by the authorities that there is no health risk from imported goods from hot spot areas due to the nature of transmission of the virus.

We are closely monitoring updates regarding the virus and will keep in line with any change in government advice.