Southern Enterprise Awards 2020

71 | Southern Enterprise Awards 2020 Sep20100 Best Community Care Team 2020 All Seasons Community Support CIC is A leading Health and Social Care company in Kent, dedicated to providing services in everything from Mental Health Support through to End of Life Care. Working alongside the NHS and leading charitable organisations, All Seasons is committed to providing quality homecare that enables patients to maintain as much independence and control over their treatments and care as possible, which as a result also relieves pressures on the NHS and their hospital beds. We went to find out more about this award-winning community care provider and its commitment to bettering lives. Founded in 1984 by the charity Canterbury and District Enterprise Trust under the original name CADETCARE, All Seasons has spent thirty years building successful and professional relationships with Kent Adult Social Services alongside a range of other care and mental health charities. As an innovative partnership between the voluntary sector and professional partners, All Seasons provides high quality health and social care in Kent that facilitates independence and dignity in care. Working with the NHS and fast track care support services such as Home With Support and Acute Response Team, as well as privately funded service users, All Seasons delivers a wide selection of support packages such as end of life, continuing care, personal assistance supporting independence services and mental health. In 2011, the latter was developed in conjunction with Alzheimer’s and dementia care and End of Life, when All Seasons merged with local charity, Chaucer Homecare, to facilitate the growth of specialist teams. All Seasons works with clinicians to free up hospital beds and provide social care to patients within the comfort of their own homes, relieving pressure on the NHS and extending people’s quality of life. All Seasons today has over 400 clients living as independently as possible in their own homes, maintaining their freedom in independence and bettering their quality of life. With advances in medical technology contributing to All Seasons’ Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulated services, patients are given the support to continue living their lives to the fullest extent, even while maintaining complex and often long-term medical conditions. Whether they require a fifteen-minute chat over the phone or 24/7 live-in care, All Seasons go above and beyond to fulfil their patients’ needs. To achieve this, All Seasons employs transparency, openness and communication across the organisation, which is built around a quality and robust wellbeing programme of support and a rewards system for staff. Training is absolutely vital for the care provider and as such, is booked in a year advance so that staff will not miss it, whilst the community staff includes Champions who specialise in certain areas so as to give expert care in dementia or challenging behaviour, for example. The organisation has a fully developed workforce programme to enable career progression and development to QCF level 5. It is therefore crucial that all those recruited to join the All Seasons team not only have experience but are enthusiastic and committed to providing the highest standards of care. As a Community Interest Company (CIC), All Seasons is a not-for-profit organisation that is 49% owned by employees and 51% owned by Social Enterprise Kent (SEK). All employees are able to become a member of the CIC upon completion of their probationary period with a satisfactory performance record. As a CIC that works closely with many local voluntary sector organisations in East Kent, All Seasons is dedicated to giving back to its community. The impact of COVID-19 on the health and social care sectors has been unmistakeable and has required marked changes in providers’ approach to Infection Prevention Control. PPE is now imperative and has consequently been implemented into All Seasons’ measures and protocols. Client management support has shifted to become more health-centric rather than social, as the clients supported across all contracts are those with long-term health conditions that require staff care up to four times a day, whether it be for the medication of controlled drugs, prescriptive equipment such as stoma or catheters or even carrying out normal, day-to-day activities. As the way All Seasons operates evolves, the organisation is now looking ahead to how it will continue developing, in particular concerning the integration of social care and the NHS. As medical and technological advancements continue to roll out and facilitate care being carried out for vulnerable adults in their own homes, All Seasons hopes to see this progress further, eliminating the need for those clients with emergency exacerbation of their medical condition to not be routinely admitted into hospital, by supporting the service users and the clinicians to manage their condition at home. This would offer the independence and dignity in care that All Seasons has been working towards for over thirty, lifechanging years. Contact: [email protected] Company: All Seasons Community Support CIC