The Top 5 Tips for Living With Carers – Tip #2 Find Good Carers (Part1)

Tip #2 – Find good carers

Without a doubt this is one of, if not the, most stressful parts of employing carers. It is extremely difficult to know whether someone you barely know, even after an interview, will work as an employee. Actually, I would say it is even more difficult with people you do know!

Having said that, the best way to choose a new employee is still to go about it as you would with any other job: advertise, collect application forms, interview and select. As the point of this report is to talk about actually living with carers, I won’t go into too much detail about recruitment, but I will briefly describe the general qualities and weaknesses you should look out for. It is difficult to glean these from an application form, so if you aren’t sure about somebody it is probably worth interviewing them, the main purpose of application forms is to filter out the ‘no-go’ people.

Some of the things you want to bear in mind during an interview are:

An applicant’s understanding of the job
In my experience, a lot of applicants are not sure what to expect from the job, or they have a slightly prejudice interpretation of it.  This isn’t necessarily their fault, neither a reflection on their attitude to disabled people. Usually, people tend expect the role of a personal assistant to be like nursing the sick, whereas in reality it is quite different.

This tends to first become apparent either in the ‘why do you want this job?’ section of an application form or during an interview. It is sometimes possible to change people’s interpretation, but it is up to you to try to do so and, depending on the quality of the applicant, it may or may not seem worth it.   

It is important that your employees have a proper understanding of their role because if they get the wrong idea it can cause lots of different problems. For instance, they need to know that you are their boss, not their patient and therefore, it is not their responsibility to make judgements (arguably unless in extreme circumstances) about the things you do.

Say you went out with some friends and wanted to get thoroughly inebriated, it would not be the place of your PA to force you to stop, provided it is legal for you to drink alcohol of course, and they should understand that. However, employees do have the right not to do anything they consider morally wrong, so they could refuse to help on those grounds, in which case you would either have to fire them, or not go drinking when they are on shift.

The best solution to this sort of problem is to employ at least one person who has similar morals to you.

Don’t assume that people with lots of experience in caring jobs will be good PAs
The truth is, this can swing either way, it really depends on what sort of caring jobs they have been in and what sort of position you are in.

Personally, most of my employees have no prior experience with caring whatsoever and they have all worked out great. That is however because I’m 18 and want at least a few people close in age to me, so it’s unlikely people that age will have had any experience. Furthermore, the majority of my care requires no nursing as such, so people can pick it up quite quickly.

Three of my employees do have prior experience caring in a combination of nursing homes, hospitals and holiday camp placements caring for disabled people. This is not the sole reason I employed any of them though, attitude, personality and, to some extent, driving licences are more important.

In the case of these three people, their prior experience made training them a lot easier. They were all aware of things like health and safety, manual handling and how to use a ceiling hoist. In some cases it can be detrimental however.

For example, people who have worked in nursing homes may find it difficult to take orders from a ‘patient’, or respect your dignity properly…actually, that’s a good point!

When you are interviewing people who have worked in care before, see if you can get them to tell you about the people they have worked with, the ‘patients’ that is. If they start blabbering about Mrs Jones from 41 Parker Street who used to soil herself and shout obscenities at passersby, you can be pretty sure they will tell people all your secrets and probably embarrass you in social situations as well!

I have to admit, I love interviewing people, particularly rubbish applicants. It’s always fun to challenge people if they say something inappropriate or don’t understand something. Obviously I’m not rude, I do it in a nice way, but it’s really satisfying to watch someone go from overtly patronising and confident to tongue-tied and nervous.  In fact, that leads me to another point.

They say its ‘always the quiet ones’, well in this case the quiet and nervous ones often make good PAs because it shows they are taking the interview seriously and want to make a good impression. If an applicant is overconfident and ‘in your face’ at an interview then it’s almost certain they will be the same if you employ them and usually this isn’t what you want. 

See you soon,

George

P.S. I split this tip into 2 parts because it’s quite long. Part 2 will be up tomorrow!

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