Care home residents and those being looked after at home will benefit from an extra £250m to continue to protect them from Covid-19 transmission.
Made up of £142.5m Infection Control Funding and £108.8m for testing, the fund will help protect people in adult social care.
The cash will help meet the cost of rigorous Covid-19 infection prevention and control measures, as restrictions in wider society are eased, and support rapid, regular testing of staff to prevent coronavirus transmission.
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It brings the total funding given specifically to social care to £2bn throughout the pandemic to help support the sector.
Minister for Care, Helen Whately, said: "We are keeping up our support for social care through the pandemic.
"This new funding will help care services continue to protect those they look after and their staff from this cruel virus.
"It brings our total support to social care to £2bn during the pandemic, along with billions of items of free PPE, over 120m tests and the prioritisation of social care in the vaccination programme.”
The cash will be continuation of the Infection Control and Testing Fund, which was due to run until the end of the month and will now last until the end of September.
It can be used to ensure staff who are isolating receive their normal wages while doing so, ensure that members of staff work in only one care home where possible, limit or cohort staff to individual groups of residents or floors/wings and support recruitment of additional staff (and volunteers) if they’re needed.
Prof Martin Green OBE, chief executive of Care England, added: "The extension of the ICF and Testing Fund is very welcome and we applaud the DHSC in securing this extension.
"The adult social care provider sector has worked extremely hard to continue to protect the people it supports and cares for through extensive infection control and testing procedures. This funding is a recognition of these efforts.
“Care England is happy to work at speed to ensure the successful roll out of the money to the front line where it is most needed and where providers have been anxiously waiting for news.”
Testing funding will continue to support providers with the costs associated with ongoing testing in care settings. This includes funding to support visitor testing to ensure residents can see their loved ones as safely as possible.
Free PPE will be provided to the care sector until March 2022 and to date, more than 35m PCR swab test kits and 85m Lateral Flow Tests have been sent to care homes.
