Published on 12, July, 2020
I started a new job last Monday, and after a very frank review with manager on Friday afternoon I'm considering quitting after only a week.
The basic theme of the review was that I'm not showing an aptitude for the work and not engaging with the clients well enough.
I will start by explaining some of my background and situation.
I, unsurprisingly have had long gaps in my employment and need money desperately. And I cannot be choosy! So obvious route is finding paid employment. Any paid job!!!!!
Other routes are trying for more benefits. One debt advisor suggested I apply for PIP. The next three professional advisors ( same week) laughed at the suggestion. Saying that my social skills problems are minisule compared to some people they deal with.
I have and had multiple advisors giving me all types of contradictory advice.
In applying for this job, one of my employment advisors actually changed my answers.
For confidentiality reasons I will not give specific details but the job is full time at the minimum wage and involves supporting people with complex physical/mental needs. Over the past twenty years I've been involved in doing this type of work for family and neighbors, so I am familiar with the issues and can emphasize with most autistics and their problems.
The problems are that I'm not showing enough enthusiasm and the will to get involved in specific tasks while shadowing existing workers. I am too reserved.
And the end of week review was very very negative.
Should I quit? Or turn up tomorrow morning and carry on ?
At the moment I'm intending to continue and apply for other jobs simultaneously. Just doing application for work at local poundstrechter.
The whole situation is a mess.
Firstly I'm not even sure if I'm employed by them?
I am two weeks into a six month probationary term.
I have not signed any contract of employment which specifies terms and conditions of employment.
I have not been paid a penny.
Contact with them has been by phone ( voice and text message). Asking me to start work at this address on this time and day.
I can cope with the work. It's the politics, personal agendas and management bullying that gets me down.
It started to go wrong on the first day. I was shadowing a senior support worker, when the task was to bathe one of the female clients.
She is wheelchair bound with physical/mental problems and on a cocktail of drugs. Two care workers are always needed to move her using mechanised hoists and supports from the wheelchair to the bath etc. It's all move this loop to this hook etc etc etc. Some loops are colour coded, some different lengths..... This goes here, that goes there. I can't remember it all.
When they started to wash her, I walked out of the bathroom to give her some privacy, thinking that it must be awful for her to have some complete stranger standing there watching her being bathed. I knew that personal care that includes bathing and toileting is part of the job.
But the mistake I made was walking out of the bathroom. I should have offered to join in the bathing/washing.
At the review this was the big issue. Why did I walk out of the bathroom? That I am not a hands on person! What was my motivation for applying for this job?
I could almost see the humour and double meaning in this questioning. ( Hands on!!!!!!! Washing a naked woman!!!!!) I was being told off for not joining in the washing of a naked woman, two hours into a new job. As for my motivation. ( It's money). If my motivation had been anything else!!! I should have been sacked on the spot!!!!
A week later I was involved in bathing her with a different support worker. This again worried me. The written instructions in her customer care plan explicitly stated that she needed two workers to move and hoist her in and out of bed and bath and wheelchair. There was only one worker and me shadowing. And I was left alone in the bathroom to bathe her. This included everything, groin, breasts etc.
Then there other trivial complaints.
Those people seem completely and utterly incompetent and dangerously so. It sounds like an accident waiting to happen and guess who will get the blame if it does, when they basically just leave you to do stuff you're not even trained for. I retract what I said before, which was that you should stay and try to make the best of it. It just doesn't seem worth the trouble. If you complain or write a letter to them it'll just get ignored, but I wonder which authority you could send an anonymous letter to in order to complain, in order that the people they care for stop being endangered by them. Maybe even a news agency or something.
CQC certainly needs to be informed, as per my comment.