IntroductionHi all,
I imagine you’ve all had a very challenging week, especially since the Government announced the stepping up of measures to tackle the COVID-19 outbreak on Monday evening. At Age UK (national) we’ve been facing similar challenges to yourselves as we all adapt to working from home (Tavis House, our London office, closes for an indefinite period of time today) and have been switching our work focus from ‘business as usual’ to dealing with the challenges of COVID-19.
The I&A Development Adviser team (Jan Davis, Mark Norris and myself) will be leading our support to local Age UKs. A key element of our support will be keeping the network informed and up-to-date. Therefore we will be producing more frequent issues of the Inform & Advise newsletter. We will send Inform & Advise updates out to you all when either there is important information to share or we have developed a new resource for you to use.
If you have any queries or require support with your I&A service please contact your I&A Development Adviser directly or contact our shared I&A email address of adviceunit@ageuk.org.uk. In this issue of Inform & Advise you will find: - details of essential sources of information that you can use to keep up-to-date with developments
- information about work that we’re undertaking to support you with the changes that we’re seeing in the way the network is delivering I&A
- updates on Age UK (national) I&A work which is
effected by COVID-19
Thank you all for the dedication that you are showing to your role and your clients in these challenging times. Please let us know how we can best support you. And most of all keep yourself, your loved ones and your colleagues safe.
Mark Tomlinson, Senior I&A Development Adviser
In this issue- Sources of up-to-date COVID-19 guidance
- TASO Briefings
- Age UK Advice line update
- Help us to produce guidance and standard responses to COVID-19 questions from the public
- Guidance on how to use video calling as a possible replacement for home visits
- Review of AA self-help guidance
- Welfare Benefit calculator logins
- COVID-19 I&A Enquiry Code
- Questions that we've asked the DWP
- I&A Review Project update
- Guidance for I&A service managers - dealing with the challanges that COVID-19 has created
- Impact of COVID-19 on the advice sector survey
Sources of up-to-date COVID-19 guidanceAge UK has established a web resource for updates and guidance on COVID-19 for local Age UKs. Of particular interest to I&A colleagues may be the ‘Coronavirus Q&A’ which will be regularly updated.
The TASO briefings in this newsletter will give you the latest information pertinent to advising our clients in our core areas of benefits, care and housing but if you would like to keep up-to-date more broadly with the Government’s response to/plans for COVID-19 here is the webpage to bookmark.
And if you have a question that you can’t find the answer to or would like some support around responding to COVID-19 Age UK have set up unique email address for local Age UKs to use: COVID-19EnquiryLine@ageuk.org.uk.
TASO briefingsThe TASOs have produced three briefings, stored in the usual place, Essential Adviser Briefings & Guidance, on the following topics in relation to Covid-19. These are: We appreciate that many of you will now be working from home and that this may make it more difficult to access the loop. If you are struggling to access the TASO
briefings on the loop please email Gill Pasgali and we can send you them.
Please note those of you that have ‘signed up’ for the Email Enquiry Service may already have received these briefings.
Age UK Advice line updateJohn Edwards, Head of Service Delivery & Business Support, Age UK
Like many I&A services, the Age UK Advice Line has seen a massive increase in enquiries over the past week or two, as anxious callers share their concerns and ask for information and reassurance about the coronavirus and its impact on their daily lives. We are working as hard as we can to answer calls, and we continue to deliver a great service to callers who get through, but our resources are not enough to meet the additional demand we are seeing. That means that callers are experiencing long waits to get through. We may also face the prospect of having some or all of our staff working from home, as the virus situation develops. We will be able to continue operating the line if this does happen, but it is not without difficulties and it could make meeting demand even more of a challenge. We are actively thinking of ways of increasing capacity nationally
to answer the increased number of calls, but for the moment we remain extremely busy.
Many local Age UKs already divert out of hours calls to the Advice Line by giving the Advice Line number as part of the answer phone message. We’d like your help in managing expectations of what the Advice Line can deliver of callers who can’t get through to your local I&A service. You could, for example, encourage those who are able to, to check the Age UK website for the latest updates about coronavirus. And if giving the Advice Line number, you could add that the line is particularly busy at the moment and it may take some time to get through.
Thanks for your help
Help us to produce guidance and standard responses to COVID-19 questions from the publicWe appreciate that many of you are struggling with the volume of telephone calls coming in to your Age UKs about COVID-19 and the impact on older people of the guidance for the over 70s to self-isolate.
We’d like to help you with this by producing standard answers and guidance for the things you are most commonly being asked about COVID-19 and its impact on older people. These could be used by the staff and volunteers that are answering calls or could be posted on your website to hopefully reduce the need for people to call you. So could you please let your I&A Development Adviser know of either the most common questions you are getting or those that are the most difficult for you to answer. If you are based in London, the South East or the South West your I&A Development Adviser is janice.davis@ageuk.org.uk. If you are based in the North West, West Midlands or Wales your
I&A Development Adviser is mark.norris@ageuk.org.uk. And if you are based in the North East, Yorkshire & Humberside, East Midlands or Eastern region your I&A Development Adviser is mark.tomlinson@ageuk.org.uk.
Guidance on how to use video calling as a possible replacement for home visitsWith the need for the over 70s to self-isolate and also Age UKs to restrict advisers’ travel it will not be possible for local Age UKs to provide home visit appointments for the completion of Attendance Allowance forms. We are therefore currently producing some guidance on how you can support clients with AA applications using online video conferencing applications. This guidance is almost complete and we will be sending it out to you all early next week.
Review of AA self-help guidanceIn addition to the guidance on video conferencing we recognise that there will also be an increased likelihood that older people and/or their families will need to complete AA forms themselves. This is something that in ‘normal’ times we would tend to discourage due to the significantly poorer success rates compared to when the form is completed with a trained adviser. We are therefore going to undertake a review of existing self-help guidance on AA to identify those which we feel are the best resources to recommend to clients or families that we will not be able to support directly. If you currently use or are aware of any such resources
can you send them to janice.davis@ageuk.org.uk and we’ll include them in our review.
Welfare Benefit calculator loginsWith many of our advisers working from home it is likely that they may not remember their login for the Age UK Welfare Benefits Calculator. If any adviser has forgotten their login or has issues with accessing the calculator please contact mark.tomlinson@ageuk.org.uk
COVID-19 I&A Enquiry CodeDue to the escalating and ongoing situation with Coronovirus, I want to let you know that we will be including an additional code to the Common Enquiry Code template in time for the annual upload for 1 April 2020. We appreciate that you only recently received the final version of the enquiry codes, but we feel that we need to include a code around Coronovirus to reflect enquiries you are likely to be getting around this. This will allow both yourselves, and us, to monitor how many queries you’re getting. The code for Covid-19 will be 1C in Category 1, Health Conditions for both Charitylog & Non-Charitylog users.
We know that many local Age UKs have raised concerns about the Coronovirus with Age UK nationally, and many of you are being asked questions in relation to the virus by older people, their friends and family. We appreciate that while Covid-19 isn’t a specific I&A query, it’s likely that older people, their friends and family will approach you with questions about it and so it would be very helpful if you could use this code when you receive enquiries about it.
For those using Charitylog, this change will occur automatically, unless your system is set so that you manually update Charitylog yourselves. If you’re not a Charitylog user, we appreciate that this will be an additional amend to your databases and therefore extra work for you. We wouldn’t ask you to make this amend unless we felt it absolutely necessary. All documents have been updated on the loop to reflect this change. Here are the links for the updated documents. For Charitylog users, click here. For non-Charitylog users, click here. Both pages are available in the Tools & Resources page in the I&A area on the loop.
If you have any questions relating to the enquiry codes, please contact adviceunit@ageuk.org.uk or gill.pasgali@ageuk.org.uk
Questions that we’ve asked the DWPWe have contacted the DWP to find out how they will be responding to the COVID-19 outbreak. In particular we have asked them about their plans for their home visiting teams and also if they would be willing to share any guidance that they are producing for the teams (as it may include useful insights/ideas for our network). We have also asked about the possibility of them relaxing the 6 week limitation on date of claim for Attendance Allowance new claims (ie the thing we tend to incorrectly refer to as the ‘automatic 6 week back dating’). So far they have not responded but obviously, like ourselves, they have spent the past week or
so getting their plans in place. Hopefully they will respond soon and we will let you know when they do.
I&A Review Project updateChloe Longmore, National Manager – I&A Review Project
A big thank you to everyone who applied for grant funding under the I&A review project grant awards. We received a high number of excellent applications for this and are very grateful to all of you for the time and effort that you put in to your application.
However, we recognise that the spread of COVID-19 will, over the coming weeks, likely continue to have an increasing impact on all of us and the work that we do to support older people.
We have therefore made the difficult decision to postpone the planned work under this project for the time being in order to allow us all to ensure that we have available resources to support us all as we navigate the challenging times ahead.
We look forward to returning to this work with you in the future. If you have any questions please get in touch with me Chloe.longmore@ageuk.org.uk
Despite the postponement of this project, there will still be many things that we will all be able to learn and share from each other. If you have any examples of where you are using triage and assessment, technology or other tools to help support you manage demand during this time then please do get in touch with me so that these can be shared across the network to help as many people as possible.
Thanks again for all your support through the project and I look forward to working with you all again soon.
Guidance for I&A service managers – dealing with the challenges that COVID-19 has createdWe have produced a document with guidance for I&A service managers on some of the key things they will want to consider in response to the challenge of COVID-19. The document will be added to over time and will be on the loop. It can be found here.
Impact of COVID-19 on the advice sector surveyThe Advice Services Alliance wants to gather your thoughts and experiences during the crisis in order to share best practice and lobby for better support for the sector. Complete the survey here by the 27th March. (The survey takes no longer than 5 minutes to complete.)
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