Back to Work!

I returned to the Care Home as a Healthcare Assistant yesterday after a break of about 9 months and was surprised at how much everything had changed. Naturally some of the residents and patients had passed on as is only natural but it doesn’t stop you from missing them, especially the ones who were understanding and helpful when a completely new Healthcare Assistant (HCA or Grey) was thrust into their midst with very little idea of what they were doing. There are also changes to the staff, most of which are welcome. I felt quite out of place last summer as I was one of the youngest members of staff there but as the Matron has taken on 2 or 3 new HCA’s of about my age, some of whom I knew from school, I feel already as if I’m settling in once again. Also some of the more unfeeling and careless HCAs have moved on or been told to move on.

My blog about the Care Home might turn out to be a series of thoughts and memories from throughout my working day or from over a few days if it is very quiet. Firstly I’ll explain something of the layout of the Care Home, the hierarchy, and what I and the other HCA’s do.

The Care Home is a ‘U’ shape, has two floors, a nice, sheltered courtyard and two or three bungalows for those who are semi-residential. The top floor is an almost exact replica of the ground floor bar the kitchen, laundry and staff room meaning there are more rooms upstairs than downstairs. When I talk of where I am working, ‘Upstairs’ means I am working with the nursing care residents and those with more serious health issues and working ‘Downstairs’ means I am working with those who need residential care.

The dining rooms are at one end of the ‘U’, at the first corner are disabled toilets, equidistant on the bottom of the ‘U’ are two bathrooms, at the second corner is a sun lounge with comfy chairs and a television (and a budgie!) and then at the other end of the ‘U’ are the Suites which usually contain two beds so couples can sleep in the same room. The manner in which I have described this suggests that the Care Home has been well designed and on the face of it, it seems to be so. However, the architect had obviously never been in a care home before or he would have doubled the width of every corridor and made the majority of the rooms bar the Suites at least half as big again. The rooms are nowhere near large enough to fit in a bed, two HCA’s, a comfy chair, wardrobe AND a hoist (and sometimes a Nurse if they are dressing bedsores) so the hoist has to be left in the corridor where it takes up the entire width of the corridor and any passing resident/Nurse/HCA/Visitor risks cracking their nut on it when they squeeze by until we have strapped the resident into the harness. All hell breaks loose when you’ve got someone trying to do the tea trolley, the Housekeeping staff trying to vacuum and people to hoist into or out of bed.

To add to the fun and games, most of the beds have air-flow mattresses and lifting mechanisms which mean that there is all manner of cables and boxes underneath the beds; getting the hoists under the beds without hitting one of these requires precision steering and timing. If you do happen to hit on one of these which is extremely likely given the circumstances, you either reverse, get down on your hands and knees and guide the hoist in or if you think you’ve only come up against cables, give the hoist a hefty shove and hope there isn’t the crunch of shattering plastic as you hit the lifting mechanism and that your partner HCA is strong enough to stop the resident from crashing into the wardrobe or wall. This sounds extremely haphazard and dangerous for the residents, some of whom have very delicate skin and bruise easily; that would be because it is.

As for the hierarchy, that is quite simple to explain. Matron runs the Care Home from the top; she or he is usually a Nurse with a wealth of experience under their belt. Then there is the Nursing staff – they are also Nurses but possibly not as experienced as Matron. I believe (I’m not certain as I’ve never shadowed one throughout the day) they dole out the high dosage morphine etcetera (I think they can also prescribe?), change dressings and obviously are extremely useful should a patient take a turn for the worse. If they are the type, they also get stuck in with the Senior Healthcare Assistants (SHCAs or Reds) and HCAs. Then we have the SHCAs who direct us gofers, give out prescriptions and organise the general running of the Care Home. The HCAs do everything that a resident cannot manage – wash them, dress them, feed them if they cannot manage, toilet them and so on.

The last Matron we had was both loved and hated by the staff as she was both strict (sometimes too strict) and also a barrel of laughs. I liked her a lot; she was a tough woman who brooked no nonsense and wasn’t above getting her uniform out and getting stuck in but she could also lose her temper quickly and point the finger easily. That said she would apologise when things had calmed down but naturally it didn’t always settle the ruffled feather of the staff who could remember the days of the previous Matron who, from what I can gather, couldn’t really be bothered and felt hard done by when they were given a dressing down by the new Matron. It shouldn’t have caused a problem but I believe the fact that she was black occasionally didn’t help. This area is predominantly white and anyone of another ethnicity who moves in causes a not always pleasant stir.

She moved onto another Care Home to work as a sort of ‘trouble-shooter’ after I left as she had done a such good job at my Care Home. The new Matron seems quite similar to the last one; strict, smart and not averse to getting stuck in. I like her initially although she needs to work on how she talks to people on the phone!

I’ve written much more than I intended and I doubt much of it will be of interest but I thought it might be a good idea to clear up some of the basic aspects of my work and workplace before I begin to write about what actually happens.

‘Til next time,
Vienna