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.