A word from Mo, Senior Support Worker at William Street
As you know, I think visibility is very important and I aim to visit every Iris Care Group service every 3 months. Recently, I visited our William Street supported living service and spoke to the people we support and our staff. Mo, one of our senior support workers, said that he and his colleagues had found one of my blogs about best practice helpful and it had encouraged them, which was great to hear. I was very impressed with the enthusiasm Mo and his colleagues showed. I agreed with Mo that he would write the content of my latest blog.
Mo said:
Thank you for your visit today, for spending time with our service users, and for always taking out time to regularly visit our William Street property. We do not take this privilege for granted.
Thank you also for your regular blogs which have helped us improve immensely.
At William Street, we now pay a lot more attention to ensuring our surrounding is free from weeds, we encourage our service users to join in, and it is so much fun. Thank you for blogging about it. We agree with you that first impressions matter.
As support staff, we have also taken your suggestions about ensuring our service users live their best lives to the fullest, and I am very delighted to say this has yielded great results.
One of our service users currently volunteers at a local charity and she adores her job. On the business side, as you highlighted in your blog, she says she would like to hold a photo exhibition soon, and intends to raise some funds for a good cause, plans are fully underway to make this a reality.
Another of our service users has enrolled for gym classes, goes swimming, joins the art trail, goes to the cinema, takes trips to the park and bus tours, and does an activity each day of the week. He has gained several skills he previously didn’t have such as laying his bed, doing his laundry, drying out his clothes and more. He is also on a waiting list to join a local charity.
Also, we have successfully been able to encourage another of our service users to embrace more community inclusion and he has now agreed to sign up for swimming sessions and go bowling. He also says he would love to visit Anfield again – a dream for him which we are working hard to achieve collectively.
There is also a service user who uses a wheelchair and is excited to be able to go to the Swindon Stadium to see live matches.
As a team, we have taken all of your knowledge and experience shared through your blogs to ensure we continue to give the most person centred support possible. As you rightly said, ‘people we support should always be involved, irrespective of their level of disability.’
Personally, that is my new watchword.
Thank you for the incredible work you do. We see it.
