Retirement villages and rest home operators are pressing the Ministry of Health for operating guidelines under each of the new levels of the COVID Protection Framework, better known as ‘the traffic light system’.
The framework kicks in from Friday 3 December but the Ministry of Health has issued no guidance about how it expects aged-care facilities to operate at red, amber and green.
“We are in the process of developing a ‘way of being’ for our Village under each of these settings but we are reluctant to introduce these new procedures officially until we have had formal guidance from either the Ministry of Health or the Northland DHB about their expectations of us at each level,” said Kerikeri Retirement Village chief executive Hilary Sumpter.
“We do not want to create confusion by introducing policies and procedures that may then have to be altered.”
The traffic light system is being promoted as an end to widespread, blanket lockdowns but it will still mean that some fairly serious restrictions remain in place, particularly in the red and amber settings.
Ms Sumpter said that while Northland remained less than 90 percent vaccinated the region could expect to remain in the red setting for “a good long time to come.”
This was unless some allowance is made for the fact that the Bay of Islands in general is better vaccinated than the rest of Northland.
She said that because COVID-19 was now in the community in Northland and “at our doorstep”, Kerikeri Retirement Village would need to maintain the Level Two procedures it currently has in place until it got the guidance it was looking for from either the Ministry of Health or the Northland DHB about how it should operate under the new ‘traffic light system.’
“We have had to ask our residents and their families to bear with us while we attempt to gain some clarity about what Village life should look like under each of these new settings.
“We could put in place our ‘best guess’ based on the guidelines for the general population but that’s not really how a facility such as ours should be run. We all need clarity just as soon as humanly possible and we are pushing to obtain it.”
