Continuing to keep healthy at Ben's Centre

Life has thankfully moved on from the long stretch of lockdowns and restrictions, but we are still aware of Covid and doing our best to keep people safe within the centre. We still have people that visit that choose either to not be vaccinated or are reluctant to access medical and healthcare services, so keeping them healthy and safe within the centre is really important. In July we were forced to shut down for ten days due to Covid isolation and we are keen to avoid this happening again.

We are so grateful to our friends at Pricecheck who recently donated some new hand sanitisers for the centre. We still ask everyone who enters the building to use sanitiser and have it dotted around the centre for use, so it is still very much something we get through a lot of.

We are still wearing masks around the centre and clients have been great at respecting this choice and doing the same. We are very proud of how they have stepped up to keep each other safe and respect the procedures we have put in place. Staff have also been working really hard to keep the centre clean and safe.

We are maintaining a list of walk-in vaccination clinics if clients want to drop in, sometimes this can feel easier for them than attending an appointment. We have also previously held vaccination clinics at Ben’s Centre. We often find that our clients are reluctant to access conventional healthcare so attending a clinic in a place they know and feel safe reduces those barriers to healthcare. This is the same for day to day healthcare, we have a great, comfortable medical room in our new centre and we utilise this with healthcare professionals coming in on a weekly basis to dress wounds, give advice on medical issues and give general healthy lifestyle advice. Health and wellbeing is high on our list of priorities and the Move More group on Wednesdays have been taking every opportunity to get out in fresh air, walk around and be physically active. In August, we had 345 mental wealth interactions, highlighting the lengths that Ben’s Centre staff go to to make this a place of caring, safety and support. And clients agree that the mental wealth support here is top notch, we have clients tell us that there is always someone for them to talk too and the benefits it has to their mental health.