Close contact services
Guidance for people who provide close contact services, including hairdressers, barbers, beauticians, tattooists, sports and massage therapists, dress fitters, tailors and fashion designers.
Applies to: England (see guidance for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland)
Please read the priority actions and full guidance below.
Seven steps to protect yourself, your staff and your customers during coronavirus.
- Complete a COVID-19 risk assessment. Share it with all your staff. Find out how to do a risk assessment.
- Clean more often. Increase how often you clean surfaces, especially those that are being touched a lot. Ask your staff and your customers to use hand sanitiser and wash their hands frequently.
- Ask your customers to wear face coverings in any indoor space or where required to do so by law. That is especially important if your customers are likely to be around people they do not normally meet. Some exemptions apply. Check when to wear one, exemptions, and how to make your own.
- Make sure everyone is social distancing. Make it easy for everyone to do so by putting up signs or introducing a one-way system that your customers can follow.
- Increase ventilation by keeping doors and windows open where possible and running ventilation systems at all times.
- Take part in NHS Test and Trace by keeping a record of all your customers for 21 days. From 18 September, this will be enforced in law. Some exemptions apply. Check ‘Maintaining records of staff, customers and visitors to support NHS Test and Trace’ for details.
- Turn people with coronavirus symptoms away. If a staff member (or someone in their household) or a customer has a persistent cough, a high temperature or has lost their sense of taste or smell, they should be isolating.
Five more things to be aware of if your business provides close contact services:
- Wear a visor and mask. Encourage practitioners to wear both a clear visor or goggles and a Type II face mask to keep their clients safe. Provide training on how to wear face masks safely.
- Keep clients apart. Consider how many people can be in the space while remaining socially distant. Rearrange waiting areas so that clients can stay apart. Use floor markings to manage queues.
- Help your staff maintain social distancing. Consider using barriers between workstations, introduce back-to-back or side-to-side working, and have staff work in the same team each day.
- Communicate and train. Make sure all staff and customers are kept up to date with how safety measures are being used and updated.
- Keep music and other background noise to a minimum to prevent people from speaking loudly or shouting.
These are the priority actions to make your business safe during coronavirus, you should also read the full version of the guidance HERE.
