Initially I may have thought that Natural
Breaks were a bit lackadaisical in their approach to employing people, but I
discovered that they were not. In fact
they were seriously involved in putting the right people in the right place. As and when possible you were put into a
situation with other members of staff who would report on your reactions, contribution
and attitude. After enough of these
situations they would make a calculated assessment about your abilities and attitude
and place you with the most appropriate people. There was no strict forty hour a week contract. You would have seven hours with one person
and sixteen with another. So you would
build up a steady amount of regular hours per week that you were satisfied with,
and with the nature of the work there were always shifts that needed covering.
Each person supported to live in the community was
surrounded with a team. If the person
had any specific requirements then each new member of that team would be
trained up to be able to meet those needs.
Each team had a team leader and a deputy. Each person supported had a social worker who
normally you could never get a hold of, as they would have been off work sick
with stress. So the rules and
regulations surrounding your charge would often have to be broken as you could
never get a hold of anyone to give you permission to undertake a certain activity. Say our man, with the eight to one ratio, wanted
to go and see a pantomime at Christmas.
First off a risk assessment would have to be carried out.
If it was felt that it would be possible for
him to attend a pantomime then the team would have a meeting and discuss the
best and safest way of seeing the project through. All this takes time and raises the question
of just how equal is this person? If you
wanted to go to the cinema or pantomime is there a committee that has to meet
to decide if it is safe enough for you to do so? The best I ever saw was Jan receiving a telephone
call. Two staff members were in Southport
walking along the beach with a person they supported. He had seen the little private aeroplane, operating
from the beach, and decided that he wanted to take a flight around the local area. If they said no, the staff knew that they may
have an incident, which they could handle, but at the same time, a light aircraft
is not the sort of place you want someone to begin to experience severe stress
and begin to lash out. No one was sure how
the fellow supported would react when airborne.
This is where it is nice not to be in charge because Jan had to make a
decision. For half an hour everyone in
the office sat very still and remained very quiet as we waited for them to call
us back and tell us how the flight had been.
Incident free is how it was described.
We had many strange ways of dealing with stress,
and by that I mean when the person we were supporting began to experience severe
stress. Our friend with the eight to one
ratio, and I mean it when I say friend, for we all loved him to bits, for eight
solid hours you had to keep an eye on him.
He loved going for drives in his car, it calmed him down, and so if we
felt that he was beginning to enter one of his aggressive phases, which could
last for three days or more, we would get him into the car and begin to drive
around. This could be at any time of the
day or night. We once led him out of the
house, there were three of us, each unfortunately thinking the other two were keeping
an eye on him. As we opened the car door
for him he made a break and attacked a car that was parked on the other side of
the road. He hammered his fists on the
roof and kicked the doors causing a few dents but it was just something else
that we would now have to deal with, minus the stressed out social worker. Sometimes driving him about didn’t work and
you could find yourself in the centre of Liverpool with a full blown riot going
off in the back seat. I think my experience
as a taxi driver had me well prepared for that.
Of course it wasn’t all gloom and doom, there
was worse. I had driven him over to
another house where people we supported lived.
I was collecting two bin bags full of clothes for our man and couldn’t let
him see them. I kept him talking as the
support staff put the two bin bags in the boot of the car and then waved us
off. He sensed that something was up and
decided to get into the boot, which he did by destroying the rear parcel
shelf. It was tea time on a week day and
I was passing the Liver Building, which meant that there was a lot of traffic. Our fellow managed to get a hold of the bin
bags, rip them open and begin to pull on every item of clothing that he could
manage. I tried to convince him to stop,
but he wouldn’t, so he took his shoes off and began to batter me around the
head with them.
I realised that he was about to go into a full blown
rage and had to pull over and stop. He
was now lying on the back seat, kicking the doors, trying to get out of the
vehicle and I couldn’t let that happen.
It was too dangerous to continue driving and it would have been mayhem
if he had got out. The incident, as you
may imagine, attracted some attention. You
couldn’t be worried about what people might think or say, the situation had to
be dealt with, which involved me getting in to the back seat and sitting on him
and trying to calm him down as commuters came over asking if I needed any help.
I needed something stronger than a cup of tea
after that one. Normally, if he began to
build up to a rage we would take him to a local cemetery, Toxteth Park Cemetry,
on the Smithdown Road, and walk him around and around the cemetery. The amount of times the police had come to
that graveyard to find out who is walking round the graves, shouting and
screaming at two o’clock in the morning, is probably still climbing to this very
day. We all knew that a decent long walk
would calm him down a little but no one ever considered that we were actually
making him super-fit.
The worst shift I ever spent with him I shall
never forget. He lived in a small two
bedroomed flat. If his mood really deteriorated
then every door had to be locked so you would find yourself sealed in one room with
him. I took over the shift and locked us
in the living room. He wasn’t a happy
bunny and even though he was pacing, in circles, around the room and growling at
me I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
The combination of medications that he was on had caused a permanent
dribble to stream from his mouth. You
could see that occasionally he would be looking at me and then he would concentrate
on something else. First of all the
clothes came off and were ripped to shreds, then gathered into a pile where he
urinated on them. Occasionally he would
drop to his knees, defecate in to his hand and throw it at you.
There was no point in trying to stop him for it
would just involve violence. Next was
that he picked up the television set and threw it through the window. We were used to him destroying the furniture
but even this was a first for me and I certainly did not feel like a rock star
on tour. He next concentrated on the
single radiator on the wall and ripped that off. I now had a nice jet of water filling up the
living room. He now decided that he
would like to leave the room and began to attack the door. He then went in to such a rage that anything that
wasn’t nailed down went out through the window, the telephone, two dining chairs
and he even tried to launch the settee out into the street. I had no way of contacting anyone and could
only try to calm him down. Normally when
things erupted the fellow who lived in the flat above would call the police so
I was hoping they were on their way. Now
out in to the small hallway he smashed his way in to the kitchen and when help
arrived was stood standing at the fridge, snarling, a sight I shall never
forget. He was naked, standing with the
light of the fridge spilling over him, eating rashers of raw bacon and growling
at anyone who approached.
On call arrived and started to help me patch up
the flat. We ordered pizza and coke which
was delivered through the missing front window, much to the amazement of the
delivery fellow; it was too dangerous to open the front door. The situation was so serious we had to call
the on call mental health professional who came over with their big needle. The moment the doctor came in our fellow
suddenly becomes a lamb, and is saying, ‘Yes doctor,’ and ‘Thank you doctor,’
suggesting that we had overreacted. Thankfully
the doctor knew this fellow well and also saw the state of the place and encouraged
him to go for a wee sleep.
The place was a mess, we were splashing about
in two inches of water, splinters of wood ten inches long were blistered all
over the pace which we would now have to put to rights. The on call suggested that I finish
early. I can remember pulling on my
jacket and as the on call placed his hand on my shoulder and thanked me, I
burst in to tears. It was the stress
erupting from me. I had never through about
how these situations would affect me yet now was beginning to understand never
mind what was happening to the poor fellow we were supporting but what was
happening to us. I came out and got in
to my car and I can remember sitting there not knowing how to switch the lights
on or where to put the ignition key. It freaked
me out. Suddenly I realised that this
might be a fantastic job, but as with all good things in this life, there can
often be a price to pay.
No comments:
Post a Comment