Coronavirus: protecting you and our staff

Due to the situation the UK is facing following the outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus) we have an important update for you.

The health and wellbeing of all our tenants, staff and communities around us continues to be our main priority and we recognise that this is an uncertain and worrying time for many people. As a result, we are now taking the following steps:

  1. We continue to follow and monitor across each day Government guidance, published online at https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/coronavirus-covid-19-uk-government-response

 

  1. We have created an incident team who are meeting regularly to co-ordinate our response.

 

  1. Our staff continue to work, and services are currently running as normal. The only current closure decision is to temporarily postpone housing surgeries in the community. If you have a query about your tenancy that you wanted to raise at these meetings, you can contact us via 01626 322722 or customerhub@teignhousing.co.uk

 

  1. We have created action plans to ensure our essential services continue as the situation develops. These essential services include gas safety checks, emergency repairs, caretaking and TeignCare alarm testing. We have also trained up additional members of staff to ensure the TeignCare service can continue should the current situation worsen and prepared for our teams to homework if needed.

 

  1. We have introduced new measures to protect you and staff when we complete repairs and home visits. We will now call ahead to check if you or anyone in your household are displaying any symptoms of COVID-19 or have been in contact with someone else who has. If you have, and the repair is not an emergency, we will re-book this for a later date when you are well and no longer infectious. We will wash our hands on arrival (if we’ve not been able to between visits, or used a wipe in the van) and after our visit. We will be applying social distancing – so we will not shake hands when we arrive. We also won’t ask you to sign or give feedback via our usual computer tablet. This approach also applies to KIT visits and gas servicing checks

 

We have also protected staff by asking them to avoid non-essential training, conferences or travel during their working hours. In this way we can keep services running normally and also reduce the risk of staff passing on the disease to others.

You can currently continue to book repairs and access our services as normal. We may need to prioritise older and vulnerable residents in the future, but for now, our service standards have not changed.

Please continue to check our social media Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/teignhousing/ for updates. We will also update our website www.teignhousing.co.uk to help keep people informed If you know a tenant without internet access, then if you could share updates with them, that would be helpful. We will also be keeping an eye on tenants we know may be isolated or at more risk of COVID-19 and ask that all our communities support us in this by considering others.

If you have any questions about this update or wish us to share a community update on our blog (such as community group closures, food bank news or local support groups), you can email us at haveyoursay@teignhousing.co.uk

 

Thank you for your support.