Council staff asked to volunteer for new emergency workforce

Barnsley Council is to use volunteers from its own staff to try to ensure that a temporary workforce could be diverted from their normal jobs to step in and cover emergency roles.

The idea was prompted by the potential threat from swine flu, but the emergency arrangements could also be put into action as a response to any event which prevented staff from getting to their normal workplace, such as extreme weather.

Staff across the authority have already been asked if they would be willing to volunteer and managers are now starting to analyse the results before deciding exactly how the system will work.

It is expected that some with specialist skills or professional qualifications, such as social workers, would be available to stand in if needed to cover specific gaps in services.

Others would be available for less skilled work, such as making home visits to care for the elderly and vulnerable in their own homes.

The overall objective would be to keep essential services running as smoothly as possible and prevent unnecessary admissions to hospital, which could destabilise stretched health services more than necessary in the event of a crisis.

Those volunteering for skilled roles would need to have current professional qualifications and Criminal Records Bureau checks would have to be up to date in circumstances where they were needed.

Others volunteering for more basic caring roles are expected to be given basic training in safety related areas such as lifting techniques.

Special Projects Manager Julie Wingfield explained: "It is something we have done in response to the swine flu situation."

All council staff have been asked to consider volunteering, though the roles would those normally provided by adult social services and children's services.

When the council has established how many staff have volunteered and the scale of skills available, it will be decided how they would be deployed in an emergency.

Ideally they will organised on a neighbourhood basis, meaning that in an extreme weather emergency volunteers would be used to help care for those who were geographically close.

"We want the arrangements to be as robust as possible," she said. "What would be really useful would be a neighbourhood approach, redeploying people within their neighbourhoods.

"The response we would need to provide would depend on the kind of incident, though I think if we had to deploy people like this it would be done across the board.

"We might also have to join up with health service staff. For example, if a nursing home didn't have enough staff, we might have to work with the health service to each send some in.

"That would be less traumatic for the residents and might prevent unnecessary hospital admissions," she said.

A benefit of the arrangement would be to make use of dormant skills, which staff have previously acquired but no longer use in their current role, such as staff who have previously worked in the authority's centre for answering emergency intercoms from old people's homes.

Such services are vital but would be vulnerable if large numbers of normal staff found themselves unavailable.

The threat of a third wave of swine flu still exists and it is expected that some emergency arrangements would be in place quickly enough to respond should that happen.

"From the spring, I would hope that we will be fairly well sorted."