Katie Brennan, Registered Branch Manager – Carefound Home Care
- Safe to Carefound, I think is all about making sure that your clients are well looked after, but also that your clients are well looked after as well.
- I think recruitment in care is so vital as well. We have to make sure we are getting the right people who will work well with our clients, but also that our clients are safe as well, so we are not putting them at risk with any of the staff we recruit.
Vivian Laurent, General Manager, Eglantine Villa
- We recruit our senior staff by making sure we get the right candidate here. We will go through the preselection stage and then and then they will be invited for interview.
- We will make the decision from there. There are a set of questions that we ask and also we walk round with them in the home and introduce them. We look at qualities about how they interact with the resident, see if they mix with the team that they have and make a decision from there.
- The step that we take here to ensure that we have enough staff is to look at our rota and ask have we got enough staff to meet the care needs of the residents? We have got a weekly assessment that we do to look at the dependency of the resident. If ever the dependency of the resident in the home, this is when I make the decision to talk to my manager to look at the possibility of increasing staff in the home. So, we never worked understaffed.
Sarah Dew, Shared Lives Officer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council
- We keep people safe by having risk assessments in place. So, we have Out and About Risk Assessments for people who go around independently, we have Home Alone Risk Assessments, but we also have specific Risk Assessments for people who need them for other activities.
- We meet with the carers four times a year to make sure they are doing everything they should be to keep the individual safe. We also meet with the individuals separately as well to make sure that they are happy, safe, and well looked after, and we also visit the households quite a lot to keep in touch and make sure everything is working as it should be.
Leanne Brotherton, Shared Lives Carer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council
- How I keep the individuals safe is we talk about things like Stranger Danger, we practice things together like making a hot drink – understanding that the kettle gets warm before they touch the kettle – and act things out before we do the actual task.
- So, if they are going out in the community, they have a mobile phone with them. They know how to use the mobile phone, and going through different things that might happen. So, if somebody would take money off them, what would they do? So it’s putting in different strategies for if the person becomes caught up in a bit of a sticky situation.
Laurie Cook, Shared Lives Support Officer, Lancashire Country Council
- As a service we recognise that Shared Lives Carers are administrating medication on behalf of people, or overseeing their medication on their behalf, and we recognise that is often a point where things can go wrong.
- So, we make sure all our carers feel very empowered, if you will, to help people with their medication, and we do that by monitoring closely where they store medication, and how they administer medication, how they fill in record sheets for medication.
- Most importantly, we recognise the importance of training, and we invite all our carers onto a mandatory training every 3-years where we update them on the latest things and how we can help them to feel well supported in all aspects of medication management.
Watch the film here: https://vimeo.com/485879985