Carer Preferences: Finding Your Right Fit When Arranging Home Care
Can You Choose Your Own Carer?
When you choose Helping Hands for your home care we work tirelessly to make sure you’re supported by some of the best carers in the industry. This is because we recruit and employ all of our cares ourselves – we’re not an agency who require our carers to be self-employed. While visiting care will see you supported by the same few faces regularly, if you have live-in care, you will have the same carer living with you for as long as you need them, apart from during essential breaks. It’s important to us that you get along with your carer, so we’ll always try to match you with the best fit and encourage you to choose the person that you have the most in common with.
What Preferences Can You Request?
You obviously have the final choice about the people coming to support you; after all, we want you to continue feeling comfortable in your own home. This means you can say whether you’d prefer a male or female carer for instance.
Male or female carers – it's your choice
You have the right to decide every detail of your care, including who provides your essential support. So, if you would feel more comfortable with a particular gender of carer then you should always let us know that.
Language and cultural preferences
Many of our customers prefer to have a carer from their same cultural background, who can speak to them in their own language. We understand how important this is to our customers and always oblige where possible.
Experience with specific conditions
We don’t feel it’s fair on either our carers or customers to send in untrained carers. This is why all of our carers receive specific training for their customers’ needs, especially if they are living with complex or clinical conditions.
Why Carer Matching Matters
Carer matching matters because our carers are coming into your home, your private, safe space. We respect how much of a privilege this is and, despite also being their workplace, our carers are always respectful of your home.
Personality and shared interests
Having someone you can have a giggle with while they carry out your care is important to many of our customers. This often dispels early nervousness about a stranger coming into your home and means you quickly become friends.
What Happens If the Match Isn't Right?
Rarely, there is a personality clash, and your carer isn’t right for you. We’ll act quickly in such cases and find you another carer who better suits your requirements. We take our responsibilities to our carers and customers extremely seriously.
Consistency of Care: Will I See the Same Carer Each Visit?
It depends. If you are receiving visiting care then you will often see the same carer, especially if your visits are at the same time every day, or you’ll receive support from the same small team of local carers. If you choose live-in care then they will be with you for weeks at a time, as live-in care package are often built around a longer timeframe, unless you’re receiving short-term respite care. Whichever service you choose, your carers will need to take holidays at some point and in those cases, we will arrange for relief carers to cover your support until your regular carer returns.
How Helping Hands Matches You with the Right Carer
At Helping Hands, we’re very proud of the people we choose to work for us. We undertake all of our own recruitment, selection and training, because we feel it’s too important to trust to an outside organisation. We build on our carers’ existing experience with a bespoke training programme tailored to their customers’ needs. We even have our own team of clinical nurses working for us who manage all of the most complex care packages. This way, we know that all of our customers are getting the very highest standards of personalised care delivered to them every single day.
Types of care at home
At Helping Hands, we’re able to offer care on both a visiting and live-in care basis, with every aspect of your care being independently regulated and monitored.
Visiting care
Live-in care
FAQs
Your local care manager will endeavour to find the perfect carer (or small team of carers) who will perfectly suit your personality. That’s just one of the ways that Helping Hands go above and beyond to support you at home.
It’s very unusual for our carer and customer not to get along, as we carefully choose people with caring for others at heart to work for us. However, if there is a difficulty, we will work quickly to resolve the issue and ensure you receive consistent care.
If you have a live-in carer then they will usually remain with you for weeks at a time, until they decide to take one of their scheduled breaks. They will then be replaced by one of our short-term carers who will continue your support until your regular carer returns. Visiting carers usually work in small local teams meaning you may not see the same carer every visit, but they will still be familiar to you.
We work hard to match you with the right carer; taking into account your hobbies and interests and seeing which of our many carers is the perfect fit. Because we have teams of people dedicated to providing the perfect carer for our customers, you and your loved ones can have complete trust in the process.
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How we wrote this page
This page has been produced referencing key insights and data from external experts, trusted medical sources and our team of in-house specialists. We have worked hard to ensure that all information is as accurate as possible and reflects current consensus at the time of writing and reviewing.