The 7 essentials skills and qualities of a Carefour CarerA great carer is worth their weight in gold. Some might say priceless, but we know from experience, when you find a great one, it’s time to hang onto them.
Our recruitment process helps us to hire the absolute best carers, to deliver the absolute best care for our clients.
The job is often tough, but incredibly rewarding and takes a special blend of skills, personality and experience to make the right person perfect for supporting others and providing care.
Remember a carer is an ultimate multitasker. They care, they listen, they support, they advise and most of all they provide both physical and emotional support when it’s needed the most. These skills can not only treat the obvious health issues but can work to fight off loneliness, lift spirits and self-confidence and by an amazing side effect of this even work to help extend life.
We know what it takes to create a team of amazing carers, just check out the reviews from clients and our team alike. It’s something we’re immensely proud of.
So, to help you we’ve compiled a list of the 7 key skills and qualities we look for or grow and develop in our award-winning teams. We know this definitive list is what makes the difference when looking for care.
Respect for their clients
During their induction through our Carefour Academy one of the first things we touch on is respect. We explain that treating every client with compassion, dignity & kindness during their care shows our respect.
Caring for another person is an enormous responsibility and must be respected. With this comes treating people with dignity and caring about the right of any client to be valued and respected for their own sake and treated with the utmost care.
Our carers display this quality across all their interactions so that the client knows that a mutual respect is building up and a 121 relationship is building. If they don’t do that there’s a risk of the client feeling like ‘just another client’ and that’s just not how we operate at Carefour.
Can you imagine being a client who needs care and feeling that the person who was providing it for you didn’t connect with you or show any respect? It’s especially important to us that the bond between client and carer is genuine and reliable.
Empathy in all situations
When it comes to empathy, or Emotional Intelligence, it can be simply done. We always ask our teams to put themselves in the shoes of others to get a real understanding about what it feels like to be the client, right then, at that very moment, and then reflect on the actions you are taking.
Empathy is a skill for us that is essential in our provision of quality home care. We also know that by having this wonderful ability to empathise it can even have a positive effect on the client’s health & wellbeing.
When you browse the pages of the brilliant Age UK website, they state that, in the UK there’s a massive 3.6 million older people who live alone. What is worse is that 1.9 million of these older people feel ‘invisible’. A huge danger, according to the website, is loneliness. We know by providing excellent care we can combat that and provide companionship when it’s needed most.
Compassionate caring
Our training programmes cover compassion, and we explain that compassion is about recognising the situation of a client, empathising with them, caring for them and most importantly, taking action to help.
The warmth that compassion brings is essential to the client and therefore a skill we must always see in our carers.
To us compassion shows itself when a carer takes action to relieve the suffering they see, in whichever way they see fit. We love that our carers care enough to help when they know they can.
Patience and tolerance
There is one thing that is almost a guarantee. Old age, at some point, is going to have some confusing moments.
Having patience when you see a client struggling with a task that was once second nature is a beautiful quality to have.
These moments can be deeply upsetting for a client and can even cause frustration, anger and sometimes even misplaced aggression. A skilled carer can spot these, along with the cause and know how to diffuse the situations gently and sensitively to create calm.
A positive mindset
When a carer comes through the door and breaks into a smile that can be the defining moment for a client. We know that there are good and bad times in each day, but the ability of a carer to maintain a positive outlook and to be there solely to make the day of the client is so important.
This becomes even more crucial for any client who is struggling with isolation or depression. Our carers tell us that a positive attitude helps get many difficult tasks done each day. It’s an enviable skill and one which has a great impact on the mental health of not only the client, but the carer too.
Trustworthy and reliable
Earning a client’s trust, and then proving it with reliability is central to building a beautiful bond between carer and client and it also helps things to stay in a routine, another incredibly useful component to providing care.
Our carers will do what they say they will do, when they say they will do it. There is no room for error or margin for mistakes when it comes to care. They can be counted on and will always put the care of the client first, and that’s something they are all incredibly proud of.
Having a healthy dose of common sense also helps a lot and luckily, we look closely for that when hiring for our care teams too!
This means that our carers can think on their feet, outside the box and don’t panic when there’s an unexpected situation to deal with.
Experience in the role
Once we look further than the skills and qualities, we’ve been talking about, we move to experience.
When we meet carers who have gained experience in caring for particular types of clients we know this can be a great benefit and add to our own growing knowledge and experience base.
We know that when you bring in, (or develop over time) skills and expertise in say, dementia care, it can really bring an increase in standards of care.
Our brilliant in-house Carefour Academy covers a broad overview of everything a carer needs to know so they are ready to look after every type of client. Our training is interactive, visuals and practical with assessments and case studies to help the learning stick and be recalled when it’s needed.
We top up these skills via social learning in our Facebook Carers Hub channel weekly with Micro Learning refreshers.
If you’re reading this thinking, we’ve listed your qualities, then get in touch and talk to us about joining the team at Carefour here.
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If you’re looking for care for yourself or a loved one, then talk to us here so we can see how Carefour can help you.
