Keeping our staff safe has always been a priority at Millcroft, which is why we’ve invested in our own training facility, along with health and safety and mental health training for the whole team. With COVID-19, we’ve faced new and challenging health and safety issues but have, once again, stepped up to keep everyone safe by introducing weekly COVID-19 testing for the whole team.
The move builds on a wide range of measures put in place at the beginning of the pandemic, including a new office layout to enable social distancing, hand sanitization points, temperature checks and mask wearing. We have included COVID-19 safety procedures in our health and safety training and toolbox talks too, and limited the number of people that can access kitchen and toilet facilities at any given time to avoid bottlenecks that could compromise social distancing.
Maintaining business continuity so that we could continue to serve our clients and their projects has also been important to us and we have remained operational throughout the pandemic. As sites become busier and we look forward to the latest lockdown being eased, we wanted to ensure that we could continue to keep everyone safe and maintain a full team, so testing was the next important step we needed to take.
Three members of our team have been trained to carry out COVID-19 tests, so every member of staff can choose whether to take their own swabs or be swabbed on site by someone who has undergone the proper training. All site- and office- based personnel are tested on a weekly basis and anyone who tests positive will be sent home to self-isolate. In this way we are operating our own track and trace system and can inform any clients and delivery partners if they have come into contact with a member of our team who has tested positive.
So far, all the tests we have carried out have been negative, which shows how well our other COVID-19 safety measures are working and is a great result for the team. We have a 10-week supply of tests and will be testing everyone every Monday morning so we can offer peace of mind to all members of staff and every client or supply chain colleague they come into contact with.
Billy Jones, Managing Director of Millcroft said: “COVID-19 continues to be a challenge for the construction sector but, as a health and safety focused business, we are doing everything in our power to protect our staff, our clients and our business from the virus and maintain service levels to keep projects on track.
“We’re delighted with how well the team has responded to the new testing regime and proud to have minimised the impact of the virus within the company, contributing to the safety of our people and their families.”
