Changing Your Career To Care
We would like to introduce Gill, one of our Compliance Officers as part of our ‘All Leavers, All Levels’ campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to show the different ways that our staff have joined us and started their career in care. Gill joined us after deciding that she wanted a career change from her previous role of 17 years. We wanted to find out more about why Gill chose a career in care, here is what we found out:
How long have you been part of Dale Care’s Team?
I joined the Dale Care team as a Compliance Officer 15 months ago.
What was your previous career?
Before joining Dale Care, I worked as a Police Dispatcher for 17 years.
What is your favourite aspect of your role?
I really enjoy speaking to people, and want to make sure everyone is happy with outcomes when things do go wrong and I really enjoy the investigating part of my role.
Why did you choose a career in care?
After caring for my mum during the last few years of her life, I wanted to work in the care sector because I wanted to help others after realising how hard carers work and wanting to assist service users, their families and care workers to get the best out of their care.
What do you do day to day as compliance officer?
I receive and acknowledge complaints (with a time limit of 5 working days), initiate investigations (within 14 days), conduct interviews, review care plans, and audit documentation like MAR charts and daily notes. After this I provide written outcomes within 28 days and assess sustainability through follow-up calls. I further review investigation records for completeness and accuracy while ensuring all actions are completed before deadlines.
I also provide training and ongoing support to staff, especially around:
- Complaint procedures.
- Medication errors.
- Record-keeping and reporting standards
Are there any transferable skills from your previous career that have helped you?
As the first to respond to emergency and non-emergency calls, I would gather critical information from callers—often in distress—and determine the nature and urgency of the situation. From this it was my responsibility to coordinate emergency responses, while relaying real-time information to officers via radio, track officer locations to ensure efficient deployment and use local databases to provide officers with essential information, such as:
- Warrant checks.
- Driver’s licence status.
- Prior incident history
From this role I understood the importance of skills such as composure under pressure, clear communication, multitasking, empathy and professionalism. All of these skills I implement into my current role.
What new skills have you learnt?
I now have a better understanding about the care industry have learned there are lots of reasons a person may need care. I also now understand how much difference care can make to our service users lives.
Even with Gill not having any care experience, with her transferable skills and keen attitude to support others we knew that she would be a perfect fit. We are incredibly proud to have such kind people like Gill on our team. Whether you have experience working in the care sector or not, we encourage all to apply as we provide fully paid training to all our new starters, meaning no experience is necessary! To see our current vacancies please visit: www.dalecare.co.uk/careers/
To hear about Elizabeth, one of our Home Care Workers who joined us straight from college with no prior work experience, visit Elizabeth’s Story: Starting A Career In Care
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