April 6, 2020
Dear Families,
I want to thank you for your patience and support during this unprecedented and difficult time. St.Amant is working very hard to ensure that we’re following Public Health’s direction and recommendations to keep your family member and our staff safe. The measures we have taken include:
Increased disinfection and sanitization in the homes, especially in high touch areas and bathrooms
Screening of staff or anyone coming into the home to ensure they haven’t travelled in the past 14 days, do not have a fever and are not showing any signs of respiratory illness, including: fever, cough, runny nose, sore throat, headache
Efforts to maintain appropriate physical distancing: maintaining 6 feet between all people in the home when possible
Not allowing visits from friends and not supporting visits to friend’s homes and no one is leaving the home unless necessary
Only one person is grocery shopping for essential items
We have asked families to minimize visits. We are now reaching out to ask you not to visit for the next few weeks or to pick up your family member for outings. Every person who enters the home or is exposed to the people who live in the home, brings with them the potential exposure they have. With a shared home, even if just one person per family visits, that’s a lot of additional exposure for the people living in the homes. We are asking our staff to be extremely careful in their personal lives to ensure that they are limiting their own personal exposure as their role is critical to your family member.
We are working with our staff to support them to connect using the phone, and other virtual tools to connect you with your family member. Please reach out to the staff in your home if you have a preferred method to stay in touch. We know this is extremely hard and are committed to helping in any way we can. We also want to acknowledge that this is a very challenging time for our staff who are supporting your family member in a very challenging and limiting environment while also managing their own personal feelings and families. We are extremely proud of their dedication, creativity and resilience at this time.
Again, thank you for your support and understanding during this incredibly difficult time.
Sincerely,
Peter Duff
Director, Community Residential Program
