A celebration of innovation among the challenges of the pandemic

Sacha Wheatley, Registered Manager of Greenwich Shared Lives, and a Skills for Care Moving Up alumni, discusses how her team innovated during the pandemic and the achievements that were made among the most difficult times.

The last two years I’m sure will remain in everyone’s memory for the rest of their lives. Leaving the office on 23 March 2021 on the government mandate that everyone who can must work from home saw us moving into full-on virtual working. That strangely warm spring saw the start of a swift and steep learning curve to embrace Zoom, Teams, and the many emerging tools to guide us through the pandemic. As swift as the figures rapidly increased the rate at which guidance changed also.

Innovating among the challenges

Luckily our well-established staff and carers within Royal Greenwich Shared Lives Service rose to the challenge, keeping the people we support safe whilst embracing the new ways of living and working. The first thing we did was take our monitoring visit processes online with the help of Zoom to start with and then Microsoft Teams, to continue to engage our carers and many of the adults using shared lives.

Virtual quizzes, sing-alongs, and activities in collaboration with our day service were also offered digitally to the people we support.

During this time, we also invested in an online training portal to ensure carers could continue to access essential training and new training – such as COVID-19 essentials - from the comfort of their own home.

New carer induction training, carer meetings, and team meetings also moved online. Although enquiries from people wanting to be carers dropped, new carer applications continued alongside assessments, virtual home visits and approval panels moved online.

We also invested in an online recruitment portal introduced to reduce the time taken in recruiting new carers along with processing discloure and barring (DBS) applications online. All these innovations have been a journey for both me and the whole team.

Using my Moving Up learnings

Some years before I joined Shared Lives I had the pleasure to attend the Skills for Care Moving Up programme, which helps black, Asian, and minority ethnic leaders to take the next step in their careers. I’ll always be grateful for that experience and the opportunity it gave me to really craft my skills and knowledge that still serve me today as a social care leader. I still value the many lessons I learned years ago about leading your workforce and I feel those skills really came into play during the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. The leader may be the steering wheel of a car but without the engine, body, petrol and wheels the car wouldn’t get anywhere.

What we’ve achieved

Two years on from the pandemic starting it’s important to take time to reflect and celebrate what we’ve learned and achieved during this time, while it has been incredibly challenging.

Our team has always supported each other where possible through this time and kept connected through virtual tea breaks, sharing information, learning and adapting to the situation as we go; sharing resources to encourage health, safety and fun; sharing lockdown memories in a photo book for adults in the service to keep and see what friends were doing.

When I reflect back, it’s definitely been an eventful time!

A couple of shared lives babies arrived amongst the team and our carers’ families.

One of our carers was nominated for the highly-commended award 2021 for Outstanding Carer of the Year at the National Conference. I’m also proud to have led Royal Greenwich Shared Lives who won the highly-commended award 2021 for Pandemic Life Line celebrating the resilient service delivered by Shared Lives Plus.

We worked, we learned, we worried, we laughed, we cared, we served…thankfully all our carers and people who we support were kept safe. The guidance, infection control measures, and PPE helped, but it was the commitment, care, diligence, determination and dedication of the team and our wonderful carers that made this happen.

Read more stories of innovation and inspiration on our #CelebratingSocialCare spotlight.

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