How Radfield offers safe & exceptional home care in 2021

2020 was a tough year for everyone but we are continuing to keep our clients safe at home in 2021.

What a year 2020 turned out to be. Caring for our older generation amongst a global pandemic has been something that we never expected to have to do. It is something that has brought us new challenges, but something that has made us stronger. Here are the things we have put in place to safeguard our clients, carers and office team at Radfield Home Care Havering and Brentwood.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Before Covid-19, the acronym PPE was something that not many people had heard of. However, now it is common knowledge and we see people wearing facemasks in the streets on a daily basis. At Radfield we provide our home care professionals with facemasks, gloves, aprons, hand sanitizer and paper towels to ensure they can operate at the highest level of safety while they are visiting our valued clients. All these products are disposable and our care team are fully trained in how to put on and take off this equipment in the correct ways. There have been shortages of PPE during the pandemic and the cost of PPE has been astronomical at times, however we have always maintained a good supply level to ensure our carers are well stocked. We have also put in safe processes for our carers to pick up PPE from our office with minimal contact, and also operate a mobile PPE service for our home care team.

UK Home Care Association and Government Guidance

At Radfield we study the latest industry body and Government guidance on Coronavirus to ensure we are up to date and following the correct protocols at all times. Early on in the pandemic when there was some uncertainty about certain procedures (e.g. whether to wear facemasks, processes around hand washing), we worked as an active member with the UK Home Care Association to clarify guidance and ensure communication to our care teams was clear. In addition to this we have been active in lobbying the industry body to push ahead with prioritising testing for care workers. Our home care professionals are extremely valuable to us and ensuring they are fit and able to work and support our clients has been a big priority for us.

Our office team

During the global pandemic, we made the decision to invest in our office team so that we had extra support to visit our clients in times of need. The pandemic has meant that people have had to self isolate at times, impacting our care workers. Therefore having a strong office team that is able to step in at short notice has been extremely important. Our office team has been going above and beyond to ensure every client has had continuity of care and maintained an excellent standard of care, despite the chaos that has been going on in the world.

Maintaining our exceptional quality of care

Despite the impact of the global pandemic, we have continued to ensure we live up to our ‘exceptional care by exceptional people’ promise. We continue to perform regular spot checks on our care team and are committed to their ongoing training and development. We ensure our care team and office team have career development conversations and see the care sector as a career choice, all wrapped up in our ‘Caring for our Carers™’ pledge. We have a number of our care team completing NVQ qualifications and have promoted a number of our team into new office and field roles, which we are extremely proud of.

At Radfield it is very important to us to ensure our clients receive the highest standards of care and we follow every protocol to ensure that we are keeping our clients safe in their homes during the pandemic. We are very grateful for the fantastic support from our clients and their families, as well as for the excellent work our care and office team do every day.

If you would like to find out more about Radfield Home Care jobs and how you can join the team, you can visit www.radfieldhomecare.co.uk or contact the office directly [email protected] or 01708 609 364.