This article has been brought to you by Slough Borough Council's Service Lead for Schools, Johnny Kyriacou on behalf of THE director of CYPF, Karen Cridland. This is for the attention of the all schools.
As more children return to school in September the services provided by Berkshire Healthcare will be working with you to ensure our teams can support school staff and the children and young people at your school site.
To help us with this there are several key questions we need to ask you and your responses are essential to enable us to know how we can best help and if and how we may be able to work with individual children and your staff in your school.
Please can you complete these quick questions by clicking here.
As you will appreciate, we need to ensure the safety of your teams, the children as well as our own staff, especially when considering we provide services across a number of different schools. PPE requirements are different for health workers to educational staff and as health providers we are expected to comply with NHSE guidance and therefore will follow slightly different advice/guidance.
To enable our staff to visit several children and young people and a number of schools they will be wearing Personal Protective Equipment [PPE] when they come into the school. Wearing PPE, carrying out careful hand hygiene and socially distancing where possible is part of our infection, prevention and control strategy, and will help to protect children and school staff and reduce the chance of spreading infections.
The PPE they wear will consist of a face mask, gloves and apron. This will be changed when moving between class bubbles and when having direct contact with an individual child. Staff may wear additional items of PPE such as goggles, specialist masks or gowns if they are unable to socially distance or if they need to carry out an intervention.
We recognise that our usage of PPE maybe different to that advised within the schools, but this is because we are travelling between schools and hope you can appreciate that we are aiming to maintain the utmost safety for all. We also have defined processes in line with NHSE guidance about removing PPE and disposal that we can share and will be required to follow.
If you wish to discuss this further please contact Karen.cridland@berkshire.nhs.uk.
We are also happy for you to share the picture with the children at your school, so they know what to expect