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The Care Inspectorate Scottish Government grant in aid allocation for 2020-21 amounts to £23.742m. We have agreed a settlement for additional funding of £1.1m in 2020-21 to meet budget pressures relating to regrading of inspectors and a team manager review. Additional funding of £0.370m has been agreed to facilitate the role of Healthcare Improvement Scotland secondees in supporting the Care Inspectorate’s inspection programme during the Covid-19 emergency period.

The Care Inspectorate are inspecting services in line with public health advice in order to carry out their role safely and to limit the transmission of COVID-19. Unannounced on-site inspections are currently focused on adult care homes with an intelligence led, risk based and targeted approach. The inspection programme is regularly reviewed to take account of public health guidance and further inspections will commence when it is appropriate to do so.

Entitlement to financial support such as the Best Start Grant and School Clothing Grant provide a vital contribution to households with eligible children. We are also prioritising the delivery of the Scottish Child Payment for children under 6. Our aim is to now start taking applications for this by the end of 2020 with payments being made from 2021. This significant new benefit will provide £10 per week for each eligible child, providing vital support to low income families.

The Scottish Government’s Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, ‘Every Child, Every Chance’, also sets out the wide range of actions which we are taking to increase household incomes and reduce essential costs. These include supporting parents to work and earn more with investment in employability services, including Fair Start Scotland and the Parental Employability Support Fund; providing advice to help maximise incomes through investment in the Money Talk Team service; and making housing more safe, warm and affordable for families by increasing our investment in the Affordable Housing Supply Programme and by setting statutory targets to reduce fuel poverty.

Visiting guidance in health and social care settings recognises that visits to those nearing the end of life are deemed essential and as such we would expect those working in clinical settings to accommodate such visits where it is safe to do so. It is important to note that the guidance relating to visiting patients in end of life situations, both in hospitals and care homes does not restrict visits to family members from the same household. This provision has been in place since restricted visiting was introduced.

However, in light of the continued progress being made in suppressing the virus, we have recently relaxed the visiting restrictions previously in place across hospitals and care homes. New visiting guidance was released for care homes and hospitals on the 28th and 30th June respectively, which will allow visits in these care settings to resume safely and in a series of phases.

For convenience this guidance can be found here under the Health, Care and Social Work section.

The Scottish Government has provided an additional £12.6 million in funding to continue the provision of food to families eligible for free school meals during the course of the school summer holidays.

We recognise that direct cash payments will work well for many families and we have written to local authorities suggesting they consider using cash payments as one of a range of options when deciding on methods for alternative provision to free school meals during the current summer holidays.

Whilst we know there are many advantages to issuing cash payments, such as giving recipients the flexibility to shop with their preferred retailer, it is also important that we continue to afford local authorities the flexibility they need to respond to the individual needs within their local communities and to ensure that no-one is left disadvantaged by a one size fits all approach.

The national clinical and practice guidance for adult care homes which was first published on 13 March and updated on 26 March and 15 May, recognises the need for additional staffing within care homes to manage the impact of COVID-19. The guidance suggests that additional staff are likely to be required to support measures such as shielding, physical distancing and caring for those being isolated to support and enable compliance with Infection Prevention Control measures including the need for enhanced cleaning schedules to reduce transmission of infection are essential at this time.

Care home providers are responsible for ensuring adequate staffing to care for residents and carry out enhanced cleaning schedules drawing on their contingency plans at this time to meet the needs of individuals. If the Care Inspectorate becomes aware of peoples’ needs not being met by there not being enough staff, it can require the service to act to improve this. The Care Inspectorate retain the discretion to impose conditions about staffing, or any other matter, on any individual care service where that is necessary to ensure people experience high quality care.

To support care homes to identify staffing requirements during COVID, a safety huddle template and professional judgment template have been developed in conjunction with the care home sector and should be used to help care homes identify residents’ care need and associated staffing requirements. This can also be used to identify where changes to skill mix and additional clinical input is required to support the changing needs or complexity of residents. The safety huddle template should be used on a daily basis to enable care homes to identify and escalate concerns. The template is designed to reduce the need to collect multiple sources of information as the information in the template can be used to inform the Care Inspectorate staffing ‘rag status’, Health and Social Care Partnerships and Public Health requirements.

Where there are staffing challenges, care homes will be supported as necessary by local partners such as NHS Boards and Local Authorities. In addition, the Scottish Government has been working to get students and social care retirees and returners into social care as quickly as possible, and working with partners to support care homes to recruit additional staff. Employers now have direct access to a recruitment portal developed by the NHS Education Scotland and the Scottish Social Services Council enabling quick and effective redeployment of care workers. A number of staff have already been matched for work in care homes or care at home under the new portal and more will be joining them in the coming weeks.

In terms of additional resource, I confirmed on 12 May that an initial £50 million would be provided to help the social care sector deal with the financial implications of the pandemic. This funding will be released by local authorities through local Mobilisation plans and will allow cash to flow to those parts of the social care sector where additional costs, such as staffing costs, have been incurred, particularly in care home and care at home services.