COVID-19 outbreaks in 20 Western Trust care homes with number rising

"As of Monday we had a number of residential, independent care homes, nursing and residential care homes with an outbreak.

"That was 20 on Monday and the number is increasing," Mrs. Molloy confirmed this week.

There were further coronavirus outbreaks in eight supported living or day centres.

"The importance of mentioning this is that we within the Trust have been working very hard with our home support team to actually provide support, particularly staffing support, to homes that are in an outbreak status," said the Trust director.

"There has been a lot of focus about workforce, quite naturally, across all of our hospital services," she remarked.

"I'm sure community service and our care homes are just as critical in this and they have their own workforce difficulties so the Trust is doing what it can to support them and to continue to support a whole range of community services that are affected by COVID-19 and staff who are affected by COVID-19 and that affects them being able to come into the workplace," she added.