A village help scheme has now been established by certain members of the CVPS and CRA working together. The scheme involves:

• Teams of Road volunteers who will seek to provide shopping and prescription collection support to the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions who are self-isolating.
• A separate team of Pastoral volunteers who are available for calling, and being called, by lonely or worried elderly people. We have a different group of volunteers offering this support who can be contacted through Lilly on:

07928 890 393.

More details are available on the village website www.chipsteadvillage.org at:

Clubs & Societies/Other Organisations

This sets out the names of Road volunteers and the roads they are looking after.

While we are lucky to have about 60 Road volunteers their distribution is not evenly spread through the village. We have therefore not yet started the scheme for the following roads and ask for people living in those roads to volunteer by contacting Stella Bury on:

 stellabury@btinternet.com

Chipstead Valley Road (including Dacre Close)

Court Hill

Hazelwood Lane

Hollymeoak Road

Lackford Road

Old Oak Avenue

Outwood Lane

It may be that individual initiatives have already started in these roads. If so, we would encourage you to join the village scheme – it will help with consistency and communications over the coming weeks.

Health risk to volunteers

There are two groups of people who potentially need help with shopping and picking up prescriptions:

1. 1.     Those who are self-isolating because they are at high risk from catching the virus (the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions), and
   
2. 2.     Those who are self-isolating because they may or actually do have the virus.

At this stage the Chipstead scheme is only designed to provide assistance to the first group.  We regret that there is simply too much risk to the volunteers themselves, and of them onward spreading the virus, if they try to provide support to those that are likely to have the infection. 

It is hard to know the number of people who will need our assistance over the coming months as many will hopefully be getting direct assistance from friends and family and there is the prospect of a Government scheme for those with serious underlying medical conditions. Our scheme is not intended to replace these processes.

Thank you to all those of you who have volunteered and please can we have a few more, especially in the roads listed above. We would like to build a robust support structure as it may need to be in place for a while.

Good luck to you all over the coming weeks.