The cliche that no two days are the same in support work makes the job more a way of life than a means of employment. One day you are listening to Wurlitzer music on the way to the zoo, the next you are making serious medical interventions. You live day-to-day with a person, experience their trials and celebrate their victories as if they were your own.
Often when you tell others that you work with vulnerable people, there’s an impression that you’re dealing with crisis after crisis, but the job can include huge amounts of fun. It’s also incredibly rewarding. Having the ability to use a kettle without help may seem trivial to some but can mean the world to others. I still count seeing that person take a sip of a drink they made themselves as one of my best professional experiences. For my colleagues, what stands out may be helping someone settle into new accommodation after years on the street, or walking through a town centre with someone who has suffered from crippling anxiety.
What makes it an enjoyable job, however, also makes it pretty daunting. We are an incredibly diverse and professional collection of people, but the responsibility that we are given is astounding. You feel the weight of what you are actually doing every day – supporting people to live a life they want to lead.
A myriad of professionals teach and advise support workers about how to care for individuals and then leave it to them to implement a care plan. That might be improving that person’s mental health, or assisting them to take medication. Accountability falls on the heads of staff who, in the most part, don’t have formal training for the role. Whereas other healthcare professionals may only see that person for a few hours to prescribe medication or promote a way of living in better health, support workers do their upmost to assist that person in all areas of their life.
But support workers may be attacked, have to assist people with life-threatening diseases and medicate patients who would otherwise have serious repercussions. If you make a mistake, you not only threaten your own job, but you could put somebody else’s life in danger. Couple this pressure with the average wage we receive and it is easy to understand the incredibly high turnover of staff.
Financial incentives within the sector are not exuberant. With an average annual salary of £15,000 for full-time work, with the added risk of violence, abuse and infection, to name but a few, and often even the most dedicated worker will eventually look for an easier lifestyle in other seemingly unskilled jobs.
Because of this exodus into other jobs, institutions are forced to use agency staff and already over-stretched employees to cover gaps. Many of the support staff that I have met have been doing frontline work for years, and they are burned out – they simply do too many hours in a working week. This is particularly dangerous for the people who those support workers assist. A tired practitioner, of any kind, will make mistakes.
Many organisations would actually like to pay their support workers more, to stop the high turnover of staff and ensure a good working environment. But in doing so, they run the risk of financially crippling their institutions. Funding from the government, local and national, simply is not enough to cover these costs.
Despite some of the troubles facing the profession, we have been largely ignored by the public discourse surrounding health management. The media consistently shines a light on the plight of our nurses, doctors and social workers at this time of great uncertainty, but we too should be included in this picture. Dealing with budget restraints, understaffing and working unsociable hours for no extra pay has unfortunately become our world as well.
This series aims to give a voice to the staff behind the public services that are hit by mounting cuts and rising demand, and so often denigrated by the press, politicians and public. If you would like to write an article for the series, contact jane.dudman@theguardian.com
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