Here at Godfrey care, we aim to celebrate the successes of our staff members, particularly during what has been a difficult few years. We are proud to present our very own Natalia Bloor who recently won the Highly Commended Award at the Social Care Covid Hero Awards. 

We are so proud of Natalia, who was nominated by the team at Ashby House due to her commitment and dedication during the coronavirus pandemic. Before the pandemic, Natalia worked as a support worker at Ashby House. When the pandemic began, Natalia quickly experienced the real difficulties that we were facing, with many co-workers unwell with covid or unable to come towork due to isolation guidelines. Instead of letting this get her down, Natalia rose to the challenge, thinking on her feet and learning on the job in order to provide the best care for our residents. 

Natalia developed her skills and learned new responsibilities such as how to administer medication, provide insulin support and monitor glucose whilst ensuring the wellbeing of the service users who also were suffering from covid. On top of this, she helped organise the care home by looking after the rotas and managing staffing to prevent the pandemic from impacting the residents. She communicated effectively with staff and the directors to ensure the safe running of our services, something we are very proud of. 

Natalia’s talents particularly shone through when looking after residents with complex needs or learning disabilities who struggled with the changes that the pandemic brought. During this scary and stressful time, Natalia’s caring and compassionate approach helped residents feel safe and secure. 

At just 21 years of age, Natalia displayed experience, maturity and determination beyond her years and proved herself to be a true team player. She is an amazing team member who has since been promoted to the role of Team Leader since she stepped up to keep our services running during difficult covid months. 

One of the things that stands out the most about Natalia is that she truly cares for those in her care, and uses her voice to advocate for their wants and needs. This allows her to not only do her job brilliantly but ensures that our services are of the highest standards for all who live at Ashby House.

We couldn’t be prouder of Natalia and congratulate her on this well-deserved award which recognises her fantastic efforts.

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Everyone has found the past two years extremely difficult with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Many struggled with being away from their loved ones, not being able to do the things that they love or felt cautious being around people when things began to open back up – getting so used to social distancing that they forgot what it was like being around a lot of people. The lockdown was also stressful for our staff and residents, as visitors were restricted, and social distancing measures were put in place. Now that covid regulations have settled down at Godfrey care, we are dedicated to filling our residents’ lives with everything that they missed out on over the past few years, creating new experiences and memories for them to look back on. We listen to our residents’ individual goals and hobbies and aim to tailor our activities to them. At Station House, one of our residents, for example, loves rollercoasters so the team decided to take him on a trip to the local theme park as he loves the rides. With the help of some of our excellent staff members, he went to the theme park for the day and had a whale of a time! He was able to go on all of his favourite rollercoaster rides that had him (and our staff!) moving upside down as fast as they could go. He loved it so much that he even went on some of them twice! It was excellent to see how much enjoyment he had, and we want to give him this joy more often. This is why our staff are now in the process of getting him a season pass to the theme park so that he can visit as often as he would like. At Godfrey Care, we want our residents to have core experiences that they can look back on with joy and happiness. No matter if it is going to the park, riding on a rollercoaster or watching a film in the cinema, we work hard to make these experiences happen for those in our care. We love when they come back to our facilities after a day out and are so excited to tell the other residents about what they have been up to – it truly is one of the best part of our jobs.

At Ashby House, we value those who work for us and want to reward them for their hard work. Every month we want to acknowledge a member of staff who goes above and beyond for our service users by giving them an employee of the month award. 

This month, our maintenance manager has been selected for our employee of the month award. Dale was nominated for his incredible commitment to improving the standard of our homes to ensure that our residents live in the best environment possible and be as comfortable as possible whilst work is being carried out.

Dale frequently goes above and beyond for our service users – engaging with them as he works within Ashby House – listening to their stories and answering their questions. Additionally, anything that staff members ask him to do, he immediately responds and puts one hundred percent effort into his work. 

Dale has been a cherished employee of Godfrey Care for almost 6 months now, and he has consistently impressed us with his diligence to maintaining our homes in the Burton on Trent area to an extremely high standard. Both staff and our service users have commented that Dale always has a smile on his face and cheers them up whenever they see him. He makes our service users feel comfortable and at ease, helping them settle when he is working. Even when fixing odd jobs around the home, he tries to involve the service users– talking to them about what he is doing to help spark their interest and engage them in conversation. 

We truly cannot thank Dale enough for his dedicated service and believe that he has been a great addition to the Godfrey care team. Well done Dale – we are proud to call you our maintenance manager!

At Ashby House, we are always looking to improve our service and better our processes. We care about those who live at Ashby and want to use their opinion to help shape our future team. This is why we decided to ask our residents to get involved in our recruitment process – to help select the best candidates for our  current Support Worker vacancy.

Our resident Mel was excited to get involved in the process and give her opinion from the viewpoint of the residents in the home. She understands more than anyone the needs of the people living at Ashby House, and what makes a good support worker. Working alongside our manager  Sam, Mel took the views and opinions of her fellow residents and formulated them into questions that we incorporated into our interview process. Additionally, Mel asked some of our usual questions to potential candidates to gain an understanding of our interview process that she could share with her fellow residents. 

Not only did this process help our residents get to know potential new members of the team, but it also allowed the potential candidates during the interview to gain a better understanding of the type of people they will be working to support. Mel was able to communicate some of the needs and priorities of our residents far better than any of our recruitment team would. 

Including Mel in our process allowed us to better understand the issues that are most important to our residents, and the qualities that they look for in their ideal support worker. This, in turn, led to us being able to make better hiring decisions. Additionally, hearing what was important to Mel during this interview process allows us to better tailor our services in the home.

Our service users are the most important part of Godfrey Care, and it is important to us that they are happy with the care being provided to them. In the future, we aim to include them in more of our interviews– taking on board their opinions and bettering our future teams. 

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