Do You Want to Work in Domiciliary Care?

Caremark Thanet: Providers of Outstanding Domiciliary Care to the Residents of Thanet

We are looking recruit a small number of care and support workers to supplement our existing team. We are looking for people to cover: Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Westgate, Birchington and Sandwich.

If you would like to find out more about the opportunities that are available with us please telephone me on 01843 235910. However, before you do that, please read the following article:

http://thanetcare.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/what-do-we-look-for-in-potential.html

This article tells you a great deal about the type of company we are and what we look for in care and support workers.

You can also visit our website: www.caremark.co.uk

and Facebook page: facebook.com/caremarkthanet

If you feel that we are the type of company that you would like to work for: telephone me now.

What Do We Look for in Potential Domiciliary Care Workers?

A Very Brief Overview of Domiciliary Care

Domiciliary care, or home care as it is often called, is care provided in customers’ homes. In England alone there are some 7000 domiciliary care providers and around 350 000 people delivering care to the customers of those providers.

                                       

I’m the managing director of a domiciliary care company, Caremark Thanet. We are a company that is growing steadily. For that reason we are always looking to recruit outstanding carers. Not everyone who wants to work for us is suitable. And, let’s be perfectly candid here: we are not suitable for everyone.

A question that we are sometimes asked is what we look for when we recruit care and support workers. Customers often ask about the experience that our carers have. Some are very experienced, indeed. However, there are things other than experience that we look for.

This post is written for a general readership; however, if you are reading this and you’d like to work in domiciliary care; we’d like to hear from you. Keep reading and you’ll find out a little about us so that you can decide whether we are the type of company you’d like to work for.

About Us

We are a domiciliary care provider serving the Isle of Thanet. We have been providing home care services to the residents of Thanet since 2012. In that short time we have developed a reputation for the outstanding quality of the services we provide.

There are two of us (my wife and I) at the head of the company: Jayne Costain is the Director of Care and Registered Care Manager. I’m Garry Costain, the Managing Director. Jayne has gained a wealth of experience in health care from working as a nurse for over fifteen years. My background lies in education and management.

We are a business. We are part of the service sector. We provide a very important service to some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We view our customers in the same way as any outstanding business should, which means that our philosophy is very simple. We aim to provide outstanding domiciliary care to each of our customers. On that we will never compromise. To achieve our aim we believe that our starting point is to recognize that:

Our customers are entitled to expect us to fit our services to their needs; we are never entitled to expect our customers to fit their needs to our services.

It is our duty to do all we can to help our customers remain independent and living in their homes for as long as they wish.

Upholding the dignity, supporting the independence and promoting the safety of each of our customers are paramount.

Without our customers our services would not be required.

We are only as good as the services provided to our customers by our care and support workers. For that reason, we have a right to be very selective in the people we choose to provide those services.

The people who provide our services to our customers are the most important people in our company.

In a sentence, what this means is that everything we do, we do for the benefit our customers.

What Do We Look for in Potential Carers?

What qualities, then, do we look for? There are two qualities in particular that we look for. There are, of course, many other skills and qualities that are needed. No-one will possess all of these and it is not necessary to possess them all.  However, we believe that the two qualities below are ones without which it is impossible to do the job. These qualities are small in number but infinitely large in importance.

Firstly, a carer has to be able to care. That, you may think, is stating the obvious. It is not. You only have to look at the number of horrendous cases of abuse by care workers to realise that the ability to care is not a quality that all people working in care possess.

People now talk about the mum test. This is a test that we have always applied when selecting care and support workers. We have always asked ourselves whether we would be happy for a potential carer to look after a member of our family. If we have any doubts then that person is not for us.

Secondly, a carer must be able to embrace our idea of customer service. The six points above give you quite a strong flavour of what customer service means to us. However, let me add some extra seasoning to our customer service dish so that you are left in no uncertainty about how important this is for us.

We are dependent upon our customers. Our customers can go elsewhere; there are plenty of other home care providers in Thanet. If we are providing an outstanding service for our customers; our customers will want to stay with us. As I never tire of saying, the quality of the service we provide is only as good as the carers who provide the service.

Providing a service to our customers is not an inconvenience for us. It is the reason we are here. If customers did not want our services we would not be needed. We take money from our customers to provide them with a service. That is not an inconvenience: that is a privilege.

Our customers’ needs change over time. When our customers contact us to make changes – even at short notice – even several times in a few days – we will do everything we can to accommodate them as quickly as we can. They are favouring us with their custom: we are not doing them a favour by responding to their requests. Any decisions we make will be guided by the principle that we will do all that we can to inconvenience our customers least. We may have to inconvenience ourselves, but that is why we are here.

Our reason for being in business is to meet the needs of our customers. We will always adopt the approach that it our job to look for ways to ensure that our customers’ needs are met. It is not our job to look for ways that will prevent us from fulfilling our customer’s needs.

In Conclusion

We have very high standards: we are proud of that. We have never compromised and will never compromise on the quality of the care that we provide: we are also proud of that. And we are equally proud of the high calibre carers that deliver our outstanding care. I have written before about carers being more than “just care workers”. In that article I spoke about how important our care workers are and said:

“That’s not to say that managers are not important: of course they are. That’s not to say that administrators are not important: of course they are. It is saying that without first class care staff who are manifestly MORE than just care workers, high class domiciliary care cannot be delivered. Businesses often pay lip service to the idea that their staff are their most valuable assets: domiciliary care companies do this at their peril.”

Not everyone who wants to work for us is suitable: but those who do work for us are manifestly more than care workers. They are our company’s most important people.

 Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Will You Support John’s Campaign?

What Is John’s Campaign?

I want to tell you about a campaign; it’s a very special campaign; you may have heard of it; you may not; it’s called John’s Campaign. If you’ve heard of it you’ll know how important it is; if you haven’t heard of it, let me tell you why it’s important; it’s important because it deals with an issue that will touch the lives of many of us at some point: John’s Campaign is the campaign for the right to stay with people with dementia in hospital.

The campaign was named after Dr John Gerrard who died five weeks after entering hospital in November 2014. John was aged 86 when he died. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease when he was in his mid-70s. He went into hospital to have treatment for leg ulcers. His family described his decline as catastrophic.

Going into hospital is unnerving and unsettling for most of us. For someone with dementia who is already confused, insecure and frightened the experience is something that we can only try to imagine. How can any society with any claims to being a compassionate one deny people with dementia the comfort of having a familiar figure with them when they are in hospital? One of the most important elements of support that people with dementia can be given is the reassurance that comes from having trusted people with them.

June Andrews, Professor of dementia studies at the University of Stirling puts things starkly: “…for many [people with dementia], getting admitted [to hospital] is the top of a slippery slope.” To find out what things might be encountered once on the slippery slope I recommend Andrews’ article to you. Further information is provided as follows by the Alzheimer’s Society:

• Over a quarter of hospital beds in the UK are currently occupied by people with dementia
• The average stay of a person with dementia is three weeks but it can be much longer if rehabilitation is a problem or there is nowhere suitable to go
• One third of people with dementia who go into hospital for an unrelated condition NEVER return to their own homes
• 47% of people with dementia who go into hospital are physically less well when they leave than when they went in
• 54% of people with dementia who go into hospital are mentally less well when they leave than when they went in

As things stand, there is no general right for carers, family or friends to stay with people with dementia when they are in hospital. Practice varies from hospital to hospital and from ward to ward. By supporting John’s Campaign you will be supporting the right to stay with people with dementia in hospital.

What Can You Do?

1.      Go to the website of John’s Campaign, in particular this page, which explains different things you can do.

2.      Download, read and disseminate widely the John’s Campaign Statement.

3.      This is an election year. You can question candidates about how they and their parties stand on the issue.

4.      Write to your local NHS trust and ask what its policy is.

5.      Go to the John’s Campaign Facebook page, like it and encourage all your friends to do the same.

It strikes us as almost unbelievable today that there was once a time - and it was a time in the not too distant past - that parents were not allowed to stay with their sick children in hospital. The generation who won the right for parents to stay with their children when they are in hospital is the generation who will benefit when John’s campaign succeeds.

If you have read this far, please support John’s Campaign.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

D4Dementia: Dehumanisation in hospitals

D4Dementia: Dehumanisation in hospitals: I have many personal dislikes to language used in relation to older people or people who are living with dementia, but a particular phrase ...

You Are Free to Choose Your Home Care Provider

Freedom of choice is a bit like freedom of speech. Most people would agree that both are fundamental human freedoms and that they are not absolute – in most cases my freedom (to choose or speak) cannot extend so far that it affects you adversely. Another quality these freedoms share is that we don’t appreciate their importance until we are denied them. Let’s focus on the freedom to choose.

The Freedom to Choose

When I first went to secondary school aged 11 the only thing that I was interested in was sport and the sport above all that I was interested in was football. The academic side of school life held no interest for me. I’d known I was good at football from about the age of 8. I didn’t know that I was also a very good cross country runner; principally because I’d never done cross country until I went to secondary school.

We played football matches on Wednesday afternoons after school. The team for the match would be posted on a notice board on the Monday before the match. There was a football match on Wednesday 21 October 1970 (yes I remember the date). The team was posted on Monday 19 October. As usual my name was there on the team sheet. Unusually, this week, there was a second team sheet on the notice board. It wasn’t a football team sheet: it was a cross country team sheet; I was in the cross country team, and the race was to be on Wednesday 21 October 1970.

Thus it was that I was down to play two different sports, on the same day at two different venues. As far as I was concerned, I would choose to play football. I did nothing about it merely decided that I would turn up for the football team (with the hindsight of 45 years that was not a good move on my part). The football match was to be held at home; the cross country event away at another school. I went to the school changing room after lessons, got changed and waited for the team talk before we went out onto the pitch.

I never got to hear the team talk. The teacher who managed the football team (let’s call him Mr G) came into the changing room with a teacher (I’ll call him Mr A) I did not recognise and pointed to me. Mr A told me that the team bus (cross country team bus) was waiting for me. I explained that I was down to play football. Mr A was the senior of the two teachers. He pulled rank on Mr G and that was that.

Even with the passage of 45 years (that’s almost half a century!) I still recall how I felt at 3.45 pm on Wednesday 21 October 1970. I was angry that people in authority had made a mistake and they were angry with me for choosing what I wanted to do rather than what they wanted me to do.

I felt impotent. I explained my actions as well as I could. I wanted to play football. I couldn’t do both. They wouldn’t listen. A third teacher joined them and all three told me that I had to take part in the cross country event. I just could not get them to accept that they had presented me with the choices of two sports and I had chosen the sport I wanted to play.

There was also a feeling that I had no control over something which I should be in complete control of. The way I reasoned things at the time is exactly how I would reason things now. I accepted that there were things in life over which I had little or no control – I had little choice over the fact that I had to go to school, for example. However, there were parts of my life over which I should be sovereign – such voluntary activities as playing for school teams seemed to fall into the category of activities over which I was sovereign. But my freedom to choose had been wrested from me and, at the time, this felt pretty unfair.

The Freedom to Choose Your Home Care Provider

In the greater scheme of things, the event recounted above is pretty trivial. The experience I had was trivial: but having your freedom to choose taken from you is not trivial. What happened to me might have been a little unfair (no worse than that); however, when it comes to things that matter, having your freedom to choose denied is the most egregious injustice. Having your freedom to choose your home care provider is one of those aspects of your life over which it is of fundamental importance that your freedom is not interfered with.

Home care, or domiciliary care as it is sometimes referred to, is care provided in your home. There is no particular pattern that this care has to take. At one extreme, it could be just one visit a week for one or two hours for someone to help you around your home. At the other extreme care could be provided by a live-in carer. The tasks that carers carry out are wide-ranging. In short, most things short of nursing care can be covered by a home care provider.

Home care is usually provided by private companies. These companies may provide services under contract with social services or directly to individual private clients. The services provided by home care companies allow you to remain living in your home for as long as you are able. This is arguably one of the most important (if not the single most important) contributions that home care providers make to individual people’s lives – and by extension to society in general.

There is little doubt that the desire to remain living in their homes and maintaining as much independence as possible in their lives are two of the most powerful factors that motivate people to choose domiciliary care. There are choices, of course: friends and family may provide care and residential care is an option for some people.

It is important that people who need care have the option to choose care in their homes. But their choices have to go beyond that. It is fundamentally important that people can choose the company that they want to provide their home care. Put yourself in the shoes of someone choosing home care. The position is very simple. The care is being provided in your home. It is absolutely right that you can choose who comes into your home to provide your domiciliary care.

Personalisation

Everybody has a choice when it comes to choosing home care and this includes people who are funded wholly or in part by social services.

There was a time, and it was not so long ago, that the providers of domiciliary care took a paternalistic approach towards their customers. Paternalism means that somebody else knows what’s best for you. In the context of domiciliary care, it was usually social services who thought they knew what was best for you. But things have moved on. Domiciliary care is now guided by the idea of personalisation.

Personalisation is an approach to domiciliary care that is the exact opposite of paternalism. Personalisation recognises that you are the person who knows best what is suitable for you when it comes to choosing domiciliary care.

Therefore, personalisation places you at the centre of everything that happens with regard to your care. It’s all about your independence to choose. Control is handed over to you to be able to choose what type of care you want, who you want to provide that care for you and when you want it provided to you.

Personal Budgets

Of course, the obvious question is how you can have this independence, control and choice over your care if social services are paying partly or in full for your home care? And this is where personal budgets come in. A personal budget is a sum of money that is given to you to pay for the care that you need to meet your eligible needs

To get a personal budget there are two assessments that have to undergo. First, you need to have your care needs assessed. This is called a community care assessment. For more information on community care assessments (specifically in Kent) see Eight things to know about Community Care Assessments by Kent County Council.

Second, you need to have a means test, sometimes referred to as a financial assessment for more information about financial assessments (again, with specific reference to Kent) see How to get financial help for home care from Kent Social Services.

If you are found to have eligible needs following a community care assessment and qualify to have all or some of those needs met by social services you will be offered a personal budget.

Your personal budget can be held by you or by a friend or relative on your behalf. It is also possible for a care provider to administer the budget for you. In some cases, you may want the local authority to administer your personal budget.

Direct Payments

Once you have been awarded a personal budget, you should also be offered an opportunity to receive this in the form of a direct payment. Direct payments work in a very straightforward way. Kent County Council pay an amount of money into your bank account or onto a Kent Card. The Kent Card is a Visa debit card and you can find out more details here. You then use this money to buy your care from a provider of your choice.

For more information on direct payments see How to get direct payments to buy home care and How to get financial help for home care from Kent Social Services.

Direct payments put you in charge. You are able to choose the company who provides your home care. I said at the start that the freedom to choose is something that we do not realise how important it is until we do not have it. Personal budgets and direct payments have returned to many people a fundamental freedom that had been absent.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Caring for Carers: The Role of Respite Care

When you think of domiciliary care it is not unreasonable that you should think of care being provided to an individual who has care needs.  It is equally reasonable for you to think of domiciliary care as being care provided on a long term basis. Let’s look at each of these points in turn.

Domiciliary care is care provided in peoples’ homes. Home care companies can provide any service that falls short of nursing care. With home care, then, there will clearly be someone who receives care directly and benefits directly from that care. However, there may well be several other people who benefit indirectly from the care that is provided.

It is not unusual that a person who is supported through domiciliary care is also supported by various other members of his or her family and friends. In many cases, these people may be providing substantial amounts of care. Any help provided directly to one person indirectly helps others concerned with her care, even if it is just a matter of freeing up a few precious minutes in the day.

Whilst it is true that domiciliary care is very often a service that is provided on a long term basis; this is not always the case. Domiciliary care can be short term. One type of short term care is respite care. There is no single pattern to respite care. What is common to any type of respite care, though, is that it is care that benefits carers as well as those whom they care for.

We often forget that carers need a little support themselves now and again. The 2011 census estimated that there were 6 million unpaid carers in England and Wales. In many cases the care that is provided amounts to virtually a full time job. What respite care can do is allow people who care for others during the majority of the time to have time for themselves to take a break.

In some cases this may be a break to have a holiday. Respite care can be provided for any length of time. It can be provided while carers take a weekend away or a two week holiday abroad. It’s often the case that carers themselves may need to go into hospital for a short time for treatment. Respite care can be provided for the period during which the carer is away and during any recovery period.

Respite care can even be provided for just a few hours. A carer might need time to go out for a day, or just part of the day and doesn’t want to leave the person he cares for any length of time. It is comforting to know that there is someone looking after the person he usually cares for, especially if there is a danger of delays.

It may simply be the case that a carer feels that he needs a break from his daily routine once in a while. This may be just for a few hours a week, a few hours a fortnight or a few hours a month. It is well recognised that the stress of caring for someone can take its toll; therefore, it is difficult to calculate just how important these breaks can be to carers: and to the people they care for.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 23591001843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.