When Hayley Claxton decided on a complete change of career she switched from caring for plants to caring for people.
Now she has progressed from being a carer at Extra Hands to take up the role of managing both of our offices.
Hayley
had spent 20 years working in a horticultural nursery after leaving
school, but when she was made redundant she decided to take a different
path.
After initially working in a care home, she decided to apply for a job with us.
In 2013, she joined our company and her career has soared ever since.
Hayley
said: “It was quite a career change but I love care work. It is about
providing care and support for people and making them feel at ease and
secure and that nothing is ever too much trouble.
“Our focus is whatever we can do to try and help, we will do that.
“It
is very rewarding, especially when you get people who require some
help, but we have then managed to rehabilitate them in their own home
and they can reduce the amount of calls they are having from us, or they
are well enough to manage on their own.”
Hayley
initially worked for a year as a carer with us, before taking on the
position of rapid response carer, which involves meeting service users
and their families to set up care packages, as well as providing back-up
support to colleagues.
After
a couple of years, she was appointed as care co-ordinator, which
involves managing and planning the rota of carers and visits for service
users.
When a vacancy came up for registered manager at our Broadland office, she successfully applied for that job.
And when the manager of our Heacham office left last year, she was asked to consider being registered manager of both offices.
Hayley
said she was keen to take up the challenge and having one manager for
both the offices means staff being able to work more closely together.
“My role is overseeing that everything is running smoothly, the day-to-day overseeing and running of both offices,” she said.
“I
spend half of my week in Broadland and half of my week in Heacham, but I
am really flexible and I go where I am needed at the time, which I
like.
“Although
the company ran as one before, having two different managers in the
different settings we had different ideas of how to run things.
“Now I am managing both offices and I can implement the same procedures in both offices, so we are running together now so well.
“If one office needs support, the other can easily help.”
Hayley has never regretted her career switch and says Extra Hands is a great company to work for.
“We
know everybody by name, it’s nice that even when they phone in you know
their voices so you have got that familiarity with everybody,” she
said.
“It is a family run company and they are fantastic people to work for - they are so caring and supportive of everybody.”
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