Adult Social Care Infection Control Fund

(asked on 10th June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if his Department will amend the guidance for allowable expenses under the Infection Control Fund to include the purchase of (a) specialist infection control equipment and (b) specialist infection control services from contractors.


Answered by
Helen Whately Portrait
Helen Whately
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 22nd June 2020

On 15 May we published details of an additional £600 million Infection Control Fund for Adult Social Care. This funding is to support adult social care providers in England reduce the rate of transmission in and between care homes and to support workforce resilience. A small percentage of it may be used to support domiciliary care providers and support wider workforce resilience to deal with COVID-19 infections.

Given the evidence of the prevalence of asymptomatic transmission, Public Health England strongly recommends that care homes do all they can to restrict staff movement wherever feasible. The specific purpose of this fund is to support the implementation of a new set of measures, identified in the Care Home Support Package published alongside the fund. This includes measures such as ensuring, as far as possible, that members of staff work in only one care home and helping to limit their use of public transport – steps that we believe not all providers would ordinarily be taking without specific support.

We published further information on the use of this funding on 9 June. This can be found at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/adult-social-care-infection-control-fund/about-the-adult-social-care-infection-control-fund

The Government has already provided local government with £3.2 billion of unringfenced additional funding to help deal with the pandemic and has committed to keeping future funding under review.

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