A Day in the Life of a Support Worker

Sally from Oakfield Road

Sally has worked at Oakfield Road for 21 years, and still loves it!

Here she tells us about a day at work.

A typical day starts with greeting the people in the morning, some people will greet us with a hug and a kiss, which is lovely!

We start with supporting people with medication, their personal care, getting up and then helping people with breakfast. We take an active support approach and try to encourage people to do as much for themselves as they can, they might make their drink, and some people can do their laundry with support. One person likes to put things that I fold into the basket for me. People are encouraged to get involved with cleaning their rooms at the weekends, too.

In the week people attend sessions at the resource centre, but at weekends they might go out to the park, if we have a driver they’ll go further on a day trip, maybe to Stratford or Henley, even to the Zoo. People may just go out locally to Costa for a coffee or to Cannon Hill Park, which is on our doorstep.

During the evenings, after tea, a small group of people might go off to the pub across the road, or some might go for a walk to get sweets from the garage.

People go away on holiday, and I’ve been to Spain, Ireland, even Euro Disney, we try to get people involved in choosing where they might want to go, one person wanted to go to see his uncle in Ireland.

There’s a walking group on a Thursday, and they go off to the Lake District every year.

On a holiday in Liverpool one person hid the vehicle keys because he didn’t want to come home, we had to get the secretary to come over on the train to bring the spare set, then we discovered he’d hidden them in another person’s packing!

I would recommend this job to anyone, we are so lucky that the people here are so lovely, and we have a wonderful staff team that makes it a pleasure to come to work, it’s a great atmosphere and a great environment to work in.