Homecare can be deeply rewarding, but for the people delivering it, the hours between visits can be lonely. Karolina Gerlich, Chief Executive of The Care Workers’ Charity, argues that connection, recognition and meaningful support must be treated as an essential part of the job – not left to chance.
A lot of a day working in homecare happens in the spaces between the calls. The twenty minutes sat on a low wall outside a block of flats because the next person isn’t expecting you until 10. The bus stop at the end of the round, sitting alone and waiting to go home in the dark. The break that lands in a residential street with no place to relax and not enough time to get anywhere near one, so you eat what you brought with you in the car with the engine off.
If you drive, you might spend two or three hours a day in a car by yourself. If you don’t drive, and plenty of care workers don’t, you are on foot and on buses that were never planned with anybody’s rota in mind. One care worker who took part in our wellbeing survey described herself as a walker in domiciliary care, and said that being a lone worker is hard, and that you have to look after your own wellbeing. She’d had abuse from a member of the public while in uniform. She had to face this alone.
What comes across most strongly from care workers who work this way isn’t unhappiness with the job. Quite the opposite. They talk about the work with real warmth and they talk about the people they support with the quiet pride Care Workers know well. One person put it simply in our Care Worker Wellbeing Survey: it’s a rewarding role, but it carries a lot of stress, especially when lone working.
The same care worker who described herself as a walker said something else that has stayed with me. It’s lovely, she wrote, to hear your clients tell you how much difference you make to their life, even though your own employer doesn’t say this to you. The recognition is there, it’s just coming from the people receiving the care rather than from the organisation employing her. That’s a gap that can be closed.
The numbers say the same thing. When we asked care workers about the relationships they have with the people they support, 87.51% said those relationships were as good as they wanted them to be. That is a wonderful figure and it belongs to the workforce, not to any employer. On relationships with colleagues, it was 76.56%. Not a poor result by any means, but noticeably further away.
Care workers in homecare also tell us that rest and proper breaks are the first thing to disappear when a round is tight. A break is not only about resting your feet, it’s the part of the day where you might have spoken to somebody. When it shrinks to eleven minutes in a lay-by, the rest goes with it.
What people describe to us as wanting is modest. Someone on call who knows the round well enough that a name means something to them or a voice at the end of the phone after a call that was particularly challenging. Being asked how you are by a person who waits for the answer. Some of that costs nothing but attention: a text on a birthday, a manager who rings for no particular reason, a new care worker paired with someone experienced they can message. Some of it costs money because it costs time, like supervision that’s a conversation rather than a checklist, and time with other care workers that sits inside paid hours. Only 52.63% of the care workers we surveyed believed mental health support was available to them at work, so there’s a lot of room to build.
At the Charity we offer counselling through our partnership with Red Umbrella, up to 10 sessions with a qualified therapist, and I’m glad we can. What I dream of is for us to be the extra support rather than the first place anyone thinks of.
Plenty of employers already do this well, often quietly, and often in their managers’ own hours. Making it stick means treating connection as something we plan, commission and fund rather than something we hope for. We commission homecare in tasks and in minutes, and a human being is neither of those things – whether someone drawing on support and care or the Care Worker themselves.
As a former care worker, what stays with me isn’t the hard days. It’s who was around afterwards, and how much lighter that made everything. More and more care is going to happen in people’s homes, and it can be wonderful work. It just needs the people doing it to feel like part of something, including in the hour they spend getting home.
