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Managing change during the COVID-19 pandemic

Things are always changing in social care, but that鈥檚 been truer than ever during the past two years with the COVID-19 pandemic. Helena Hitchcox, Director of Operations at Unique Senior Care shares how they adapted to changes during this time.

Unique Senior Care was established almost 11 years ago and was founded on the principles of providing high-quality care and support, based on the personal experiences of care provision for family members of our company owners.

I’m very proud to lead a team where we have two Care Quality Commission (CQC) ‘Outstanding’ ratings in Solihull and Coventry, and ‘Good’ ratings in all other registered locations.

I originally joined the company as a care manager, and I’ve been Director of Operations for the past two and a half years - of which the last two years have been during the global pandemic.

The impact of COVID-19

This time two years ago we headed into the first lockdown. No-one could have foreseen the journey ahead of us.

Our team and the people we supported faced massive challenges during this time, including reduced staffing capacity due to self-isolation, loss of routine health appointments for people with long-term health conditions, an increased sense of anxiety, and lack of capacity in hospital for people who didn’t need critical and emergency medical care.

Aside from the changes in how we supported our residents and the care that was required, the other biggest changes for our team were in how we worked during this time.

Changes to how we worked

The initial lockdown saw the implementation of home working for all office employees. This created a huge change for our services in how they worked together as a team to ensure the effective running of services and ensure our people had the right support. We implemented robust risk assessments so that our operational management teams were able to maintain effective services and care for both our staff and the people we support.

Managers implemented new ways of communicating such as creating WhatsApp groups, weekly calls, and newsletters to keep the connection between employees and the workplace. Lack of opportunity to meet face-to-face, socialise together and call in for a chat with the office team created a feeling of isolation for our caregivers, so it was crucial to develop other methods of communication.

To ensure continuing staff development a swift transition to eLearning worked well. We implemented additional on-the-job competency assessments to support our caregivers with their confidence, and we’ve since reinstated face-to-face training and ensured that all who joined us through the lockdown have received additional training.

Recruitment

We also turned to digital platforms for recruitment, allowing us to carry out virtual interviews.

Over the past nine months we’ve faced significant recruitment challenges. We’ve implemented a ‘Recruitment, retention and engagement strategy’ to support this crisis which provides a clear focus on delivering our plan to ensure that we attract and retain high-quality staff.

Supporting wellbeing

The pandemic has impacted mental health for both staff and the people we support. We’ve been proactive and adaptable in providing effective and well-led management to our caregiving staff to support their wellbeing.

Ensuring regular communication via memos, updated policies, and video messages has been crucial in keeping people involved and informed. Ongoing engagement projects were implemented such as a mental health support Facebook group called Unique Minds Matter to give staff platforms for involvement and to ensure that they feel listened to.

Maintaining these efforts was crucial through winter and we’ve ensured that we do all we can to protect and support care workers through what continues to be a challenging and difficult time.

We’ve developed a new wellbeing strategy. The aim of our strategy is to work with our staff to integrate health and wellbeing into day-to-day activities to enable us to develop a positive and healthy working environment.

Through the strategy we’ll provide a framework where we can take a proactive and engaging approach to enhancing the health and wellbeing of our staff. This will be achieved through wellbeing initiatives, employee support mechanisms, and joint working with staff, their representatives, and local partners.

We’ll work with employees to ensure those issues which may impact negatively on staff health are identified and addressed. We’ll ensure that managers have the key skills, knowledge, and ability to support employees to improve their health and wellbeing. We’ll also ensure that we increase awareness among our employees as to what is important in ensuring their own health and wellbeing.

Looking ahead

At Unique, we pride ourselves on our focus on continuous improvement. We’ve not put new projects on hold and have continually challenged ourselves to grow and develop despite the challenges.

I would say that our focus on continuous improvement is what supports us to maintain ‘Good’ and ‘Outstanding’ ratings across our services; we have a robust framework in place to achieve and maintain our ratings, from compliance through to innovations and always aim to learn from complaints, mistakes, and the successes of others.

To achieve what we have, you need the commitment to challenge what you’re doing every day and seek the 5% factor, always strive for more today than what you did yesterday.

My motto is that every day is an inspection day, that we expect high-quality standards across every area of the business 365 days of the year, not just in the lead up to an inspection.

The pandemic has certainly challenged us, but with a high-performing and committed team we’ve survived and continue to look to the future and how we can develop and grow. 2022 continues to have its challenges, however we remain resilient and have a focus on developing our services to reflect the communities we serve.

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