31 | Q4 2021 Oct21758 All Seasons Community Support is one of Kent’s leading and largest Health and Social Care companies. With over 250 carers and support staff we provide care services across East Kent for a range of diverse needs. We speak to Maria Nicholls about how Covid has affected the sector. All Seasons has served the local community of East Kent for over 30 years and in that time has grown from providing social care, to having contracts with the local authority to support 300 plus service users with personal care, long term medical conditions, associated medication and medical equipment. The latter enables patients to remain in their own homes for as long as they wish to do so. “Our health contracts are all about enablement and that means freeing up hospital beds by fasttracking patient transfer to home and supporting them to get back to pre-hospital routine,” explains Maria Nicholls, the registered Manager at All Seasons. “This could see us supporting them from one day to a week, with the current crisis in social care we could find ourselves supporting a patient for longer as they wait for a care provider to accept them for long term social care. Across all contracts we are passionate about choice and total involvement, and this is a thread that runs through everything we do when support our service users.” The client base is predominantly aged 65 or over and most have either a long term medical condition or a disability that prevents them from being fully independent. All Seasons first approach would be to meet with them to discuss and produce a bespoke person centred care plan. “We aim to listen and ensure that the end product be one that sees the service user completely involved in their care within their ability to do so,” elaborates Maria. “We encourage family and friends to be present at all care plan meetings, so we fully meet the dynamics of the support needed. Our unique selling point is we can take patients home from Best Temporary & Permanent Care Provider 2021 hospital and support them through enablement and see them go forward for long term social care where they can remain with us and the staff, they have become familiar with.” The organisation is also the only care provider to have a dedicated Acute Response Team (ART) of eight staff who work alongside the community nurses and GPs to avoid hospital admission and support patients to get well in their own home. “All of our staff are crucial to the success of All Seasons, and we remind them of this as much as we can. The annual survey will always see service users 100% praiseworthy of their care team and we are always keen to feed this back to the teams and reward them with shopping vouchers. We are an open and transparent organisation and encourage interaction. When recruiting we look for the applicant to demonstrate a passion, enthusiasm and a potential ability to care,” Maria adds. Covid-19 was most definitely a game changer for All Seasons. Maria tells us, “Our staff were incredibly brave on a daily basis leaving their families each day for up to 8/9 hours and then back again in the evening not knowing what they would find behind each front door. We set up a wellbeing help line with specialist counsellors to support the many staff who thought they were going to die but still continued to work. We are immensely proud that we lost no one during 2020 through Covid, either staff or service user.” All Seasons now faces an unprecedented time. With continuing struggles due to lack of staff, and controversy over rates of pay, there are many local care providers closing due to such challenges. One advantage of late which Maria has seen is the financial block payment from the local authorities that has enabled All Seasons to purchase large quantities of PPE, which has now become standard equipment. Additional block payments from the Government have also enabled staff to receive well-deserved bonuses too. “With less staff that we had this time last year we are preparing for a difficult winter. There are also thousands of individuals waiting for long term care and we care very much about these people in a hospital bed waiting to go home,” says Maria. For All Seasons staff, the future is uncertain, however Maria pledges that she and the team will continue to work through all adversity to provide the care that their patients need in these desperate times. Contact: Maria Nicholls Company: All Seasons Community Support CIC Web Address: www. allseasons.org.uk
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