At a point in time when you are occupied with work and cannot dedicate your time to your family completely, you need someone’s assistance. This assistance can be from other family members or from someone external. When you are looking for a personal care assistance, there are many whereabouts going in your mind. Hiring a personal care assistance can be a challenge in real life! Finding a well-trained personal care assistant can simplify your life and help you keep your family and you, both happy. But there are a series of challenges that you need to overcome to get a good personal care assistant in UK.
The major challenge is from where and how to begin the hunt for a good personal caregiver. There’s often a dilemma of trusting an agency to appoint a carer for you or to get on your own feet and begin the hunt. Both the options have its pros and cons. Appointing a personal care agency will help you choose trusted and trained caretakers. It will reduce the risk of any fraudulence or any misbehavior. When you approach an agency, the way of hiring a personal carer will be very professional. You cannot develop personal relations and hence your aim of hiring the personal carer may not be achieved.
On the other hand, when you look for a personal carer all by yourself, there are high chances that you will pick someone from the people you already know. Hence the grounds of personal relations is already laid. But then, you may face challenges as that person may or may not be skilled enough to cater to your needs.
Irrespective of which way you are hiring a care giver, there are some hygiene factors that you always need to consider. Here are those:
- Establish personal relations: When you are hiring a caregiver, in a way you are adding a person to your family to look after your beloveds. In this case thus, it is important that you establish good personal relations with that person. Once you establish a strong connection with the caretaker, you develop mutual trust and understanding which is important while hiring a caregiver.
- Conducting a background check: Before you hire a carer, it is important to essential to do a background check. Cross examine with the police for any criminal record, find out if the caregiver you are interviewing is addict to drugs or any other addictive. If the caregiver has been working elsewhere earlier, try connecting with that family and find out about the caregiver and their experience with him/her.
- Meet informally: Meet the candidate informally, at a park, or for shopping or anything else. An informal meet helps you understand a person better. Ask the candidate about some personal experiences about caretaking, or any other situational questions where you’ll know well the person.
- Sign a contract: Make it a point to sign the contract between the caregiver. Put in all the terms and conditions along with the decided remuneration, working hours and responsibilities. This helps in keeping clarity and a clear record between you and the caretaker.
- Training: If the personal care assistant needs to take care of a person suffering from heavy medication or who would be required to provide with medical aid from time to time like syringes or medicines; make sure the caretaker is aware of it before hand. In special cases, make it a point that the caregiver is trained for injecting or at least knows a proper background about the health problems of the person he has to look after.
- Acquaintance with the caretaker: For a good relation between the person you are appointing the carer for and the carer, it is important that the two get well together. It is important that your family member who is to be looked after like the carer and vice versa. Before finalizing the caregiver, you should make both of them meet and proceed only with their consent.
Hiring a personal care assistant is not only a recruitment process as the person is practically going to be a part of your family. You need to be very careful and choosy. After all, your loved ones are the one at stake!