The Rewards of Working in Care
The joy of knowing that you have directly helped someone.
Knowing that the person you care for values your support and now has a better quality of life and is not left trying to cope alone.
Knowing that you have made a difference.
The enjoyment of a sociable and interactive role in the local community
The feeling of being needed and appreciated.
Learning Disabilities Worker
A great deal of our work is with adults and children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. The spectrum is very wide, with those with Asperger’s Syndrome at the milder end, to those with profound Autism at the more challenging end of the scale. The common theme throughout this range is an inability to communicate, to one degree or another, with other people and with the world around them. At its most severe this inability to be understood can result in a great deal of frustration resulting in challenging behaviour. It is our staff's ability and willingness to work with clients who may exhibit this challenging behaviour that marks them out as truly special.
In addition we help to look after those with Cerebral Palsy, Downs Syndrome and a range of other conditions that fall under the general description of "Learning Disabilities".
What Our Support Workers Do
Support Workers are required to assist in providing an agreed programme of support to service users in a flexible, co-ordinated and effective way, taking into account the values of the Service Unit.
This includes sharing with other staff in meeting the personal and social care needs of service users and to promote well-being in a way that values the dignity of the individual and promotes choice, respect, participation and independence.
The needs of each individual you will look after will be different, but in general terms, the work will involve some or all of the following:
- Help to get up and dressed in the morning, help going to bed at night
- Assistance with washing, bathing or shaving
- Help with cooking, cleaning, ironing
- Assistance with eating and drinking
- Helping with leisure activities (riding bikes, swimming, playing games, listening to music, watching a DVD, etc)
- Going on day trips to shops, parks, cafés, walks
- Travelling to and from activities (possibly driving a vehicle)
- Assisting with their interaction with other service users
- Assistance with communication at all levels
This is a far from exhaustive list, but gives you a flavour of the nature of the job role. In some respects the role may sound a simple one, but that is one thing it is certainly not! The day-to-day work may not be too taxing physically, but can be mentally challenging instead.
The reward comes from knowing that you are providing a really meaningful service to someone who is less fortunate in many ways, than you are. Though sometimes those rewards may appear hard to find, when you make "contact" with someone who doesn’t make "contact" with others very easily or very often, the reward you gain is one that you will cherish for a very long time.
Variety of Work and Workplace
Although the nature of our work may be considered to be "temporary" i.e. our staff do not have a permanent job with one particular client - the volume of work that we carry out means that we are able to provide all or our staff with a guaranteed number of hours, which enables them to enjoy a secure job role.
This then means that you can benefit from guaranteed hours whilst having the flexibility of working at a range of different establishments, looking after a wide variety of service users, with different needs or disabilities and across an age range from 3 to 83.
Very often our clients will tell us that they particularly like a specific person and would like to have them back on a regular basis which has led, in many cases, to one of our team working at the same establishment and with the same client for months and even years on end. In such cases, if all parties are happy, we are very happy to allow this to happen, though from everyone’s perspective, a little variety tends to be a good thing, and wherever possible we encourage our carers to work with several different clients, and our clients to be supported by a small team of staff, rather than a single individual.