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RESOLVED: that
Cabinet
a)   
Approved the commencement of safe closure programme
with immediate effect, which would support residents to move to
alternative residential care accommodation within the
area.
b)   
Approved the commencement of formal consultation
with affected staff members on their redeployment into other
council services in accordance with established HR policies and
processes.
 
REASONS RESOLVED:
The recommendations
seek:
·        
To enable the Council to prevent Boniface House
becoming both unsustainable and unsafe to the point that there is
risk to the wellbeing of the care homes residents.
·        
To ensure that residents receive the high quality of
care in a setting that is suitable and meets both their needs and
the needs of future residents.
·        
To ensure the Council is able to deliver best use of
its available adult social care budgets in meeting its statutory
duties.
 
ALTERNATIVE ACTIONS:
No change : The utilisation of
the care home would continue to decline and the service would have
an increasing difficulty in providing safe staffing levels. The
condition of the building is likely to result in an issue similar
to the water leak which happened at Boniface in October 2022 and
residents would need to be moved to alternate provision at the
point of crisis.
 
Refurbish/develop the home: The
council could invest in the remodelling of the care home to create
ensuite capacity. This level of work would however require the
residents to be relocated for the duration of the redevelopment.
Any redevelopment of the homes within the existing footprint would
reduce the number of rooms, thus increasing the unit cost and
making the Council even further out of step with its own Fair Cost
of Care rate.
 
Safe closure programme: A
programme of safe closure would involve, stopping new admissions to
the service and recruitment to any staff vacancies within the home.
Residents’ needs would be reviewed and we would work with
them and their families to identify alternative arrangements for
their care. For the affected staff group we would engage the
council’s appropriate HR policies and undertake a process of
redeployment of staff into our other care settings, with redundancy
only where unavoidable. As far as possible we would seek to
resettle people with the redeployed staff into Council delivered
homes to support continuity of care and maintain friendship groups
as far as possible.