Written evidence submitted by Chew Valley Community Transport Scheme (CIT0254)

Chew Valley Community Transport (CVCT) is a small, volunteer-led and CIC supported, local transport service. We match passengers who need a lift to medical appointments with volunteer drivers who use their own vehicles to offer what is usually a return journey, to and from, the appointment. The service covers a largely rural area at the north western extreme of Bath & NE (B&NES) Council area and crosses the border into , south of .

There is no local service that we are aware of provided by our local authorities, or the health service, to take people with relatively good mobility to their medical appointments safely.

This area is very poorly served by public transport. This has major implications for unwell, frail, disabled or elderly people who do not have their own transport or qualify for hospital transport, which has been severely cut-back and is rarely available. Most people in this area rely on family, friends or neighbours to support their attendance at medical appointments. We try to support those who do not have these to fall back on. The cost of private taxis in this area is significant and usually prohibitive. Since the emergence of Coronavirus this year some passengers who could normally have been able to afford to pay a commercial taxi company have also expressed more anxiety about using them.

Our passengers give their drivers a small sum to cover expenses, based on mileage. CVCT ensures that all our drivers have current DRB checks and that their vehicles have up to date MOT, tax and appropriate insurance. Most of the journeys we cover are to appointments at five local GP surgeries or to hospitals in Bristol or Bath, occasionally Weston-super-Mare or Thornbury. There are no hospitals in our geographical area. We also take passengers to many optician, physiotherapy and dental practices both locally and neighbouring towns and cities.

We take passengers to more than ten different hospitals or other secondary care facilities, all of whom have different parking procedures or access issues. All of this can make it confusing or difficult for both our passengers and drivers, many of which have had to change due to Covid-19

Issues for our service during the pandemic:

1. Sudden shortage of volunteer drivers: at the start of lockdown, following government advice for those over 70 to stay at home, we found that we had only two drivers under 70 years of age.

Although most medical appointments were cancelled, and so demand reduced, we had to immediately recruit more volunteer drivers. We initially began to offer to collect and deliver prescriptions, too, but found this was a service that other community groups took on. Several of our volunteers signed up to national volunteering schemes during the lockdown and were not used. Although we were able to recruit a few more drivers during lockdown, some of those have now had to return to work and are no longer able to help us. Almost all our current drivers are over 60. As lockdown was eased, several of our former drivers, mainly in their 70s but also a few in their 80s, wanted to return to volunteering. A significant number, although wanting to stay on our books in the hope of improvement next year, have continued to feel too vulnerable themselves. At the latest count, Thursday 29th October 2020, we have 23 drivers and 322 passengers currently using our service. At the moment, with cases rising again, we are likely to lose some of those who have returned to driving in the last few months, so we are once again trying to recruit more drivers for the winter.

2. Lack of guidance and support for volunteer services such as ours: we researched the published Covid-19 infection precautions and adapted these guidelines for our drivers and passengers. We sourced and supplied hand sanitiser and face masks.

We feel we have a duty to give Covid safety advice and supplies to our drivers, but there has been little specific support or advice for older volunteers driving vulnerable passengers.

We tried hard to limit the exposure of both our drivers and passengers to infection by “pairing up” both drivers and passengers - ie trying to ensure that the same driver took passengers to their appointments. Most of these were essential GP appointments, for example, weekly appointments for ulcer dressings etc. During lockdown the six volunteer co-ordinators divided the lists of both passengers and drivers and proactively contacted them all by telephone, both to update our records and to offer reassurance and emotional support. All this necessitated a lot more discussion and liaison between the co-ordinators themselves. They had previously met every three months or so. During lockdown they began to meet weekly via zoom.

3. Anxiety - as lockdown was eased and appointments began to be offered, we started to have more journey requests. We found many passengers, and some drivers, struggling to deal with appointments, struggling to be confident about being outside their homes. Shielding and isolation had clearly had functional effects on them.

4. More new requests for transport to journeys we would not normally cover: Since lockdown eased, we have so far had at least two cases of requests from other services or support workers to transport people with dementia to a day care centre in a suburb of Bath – a distance of approximately 20 miles, depending on where the passenger actually lives. We were told there is no statutory service able to provide transport.

One passenger was offered day care for two days/week, the other for three. Both of them required two separate journeys – to go in and to return. It was not possible or appropriate for both passengers to be driven in one car by one driver for any of these journeys. The people with dementia were, in any case, offered their day care places on different days of the week, but even had they both been offered a place on the same day we felt it would not be safe for two passengers with dementia to be transported by one driver in a private car.

In both cases the person with dementia had deteriorated during lockdown, one of them had reportedly become much more aggressive, and they needed the day care offered. Their carers, having not had any break from their relatives throughout lockdown, desperately needed respite. Neither carer was in a position to be able to take their relative to the day care centre (one couldn’t drive) and there was no other family member available to regularly do so either. Our service simply does not have enough volunteer drivers to be able to provide such cover but our drivers responded magnificently and we were able to help for a couple of weeks until a local volunteer bus transport service was able to take these on.

We find it extraordinary that such day care services do not come with a transport package.

Recommendations: WE NEED:

 Increase the provision of specialist services and Consultant clinics at Primary Care hubs in rural areas to reduce the need for individual patients to travel so far out of area. AND / OR  “Geographical area” days for hospital clinics so that transport to them might be shared from rural areas such as ours (although that will only be safe post-Covid!)  Support the “greening” and co-ordination of volunteer / local / community transport services  Acknowledge and support local initiatives  A group of local parish councils wanted to use some of their CiL funding jointly for joint ventures but the legislation does not allow this.  Locally our experience of the lockdown has shown how much mutual support is available in an area like ours using local knowledge.  PLEASE work with local communities to develop local solutions

October 2020