HELP IF YOU ARE SHIELDING:
If you, or anybody in your household, have received a letter from the Chief Medical Officer asking you to shield yourself for 12 weeks, you need to make yourself known to the Local Authority, who will make arrangements to deliver food parcels if necessary and any other support you and your family require.
Your pharmacy should also start to deliver your prescriptions to your home. There is a mobile phone number in the letter for the SMS Shielding Service: if you text your CHI number to this service, they will keep you up-to-date with relevant information by text message.
You can contact East Dunbartonshire Council’s Shielding Helpline on 0141 777 3345, and they will be able to tell you what support is being put in place for you. The Scottish Government has also updated its information about Shielding support and contacts.
If you are shielding, you can also use the Shopping Service to supplement your food parcels.
HELP IF YOU ARE SELF-ISOLATING:
If you or anyone in your household are self-isolating, you can get shopping and prescriptions delivered to your door. A network of volunteers, co-ordinated by East Dunbartonshire Voluntary Action, is working with OPAL to cover the whole of East Dunbartonshire.
How the Shopping Service Works:
When you need shopping, or you have a prescription to collect, call OPAL on 0141 438 2347, or email info@opaleastdun.org.uk. OPAL is accepting calls 7 days per week, from 9:00am until 5:00pm. Outside of those hours you can leave a voicemail.
The OPAL Adviser will take your name, address and telephone number, and these will be passed to the Volunteer Co-ordinator in your local area.
The Volunteer Co-ordinator will contact you directly and take down your shopping list, or the details of where your prescription is.
A Volunteer will go and buy what they can from your list – supermarkets are still not fully stocked and there are still some shortages of particular products.
The Volunteer will bring the shopping to your door, knock or ring the doorbell, and then walk away. They cannot help you to bring your shopping into the house.
Payment:
You will be contacted about payment after your shopping has been delivered. We aim to be as flexible as possible about payment, we can take card payments over the phone, bank transfers, or PayPal.
Cash is the option of last resort, as we do not want to expose our Volunteers to the risk of handling money, which can be a disease vector, or the risk that they might be accused of impropriety.
OPAL IS STILL ANSWERING YOUR QUESTIONS:
OPAL is an information and advice service for East Dunbartonshire, and even in the midst of this current situation, we can still help you to find the information you need.
Give us a call on 0141 438 2347, or drop us an email at info@opaleastdun.org.uk and have a chat with one of the OPAL Advisers.
