 Hi everyone and welcome back to another vlog. My name is Claire Carmichael and I am a general practice nurse. Now even though I'm a GP nurse, I spent five years or five and a bit years working as a health care assistant in a residential home for the elderly. I also worked in a nursing home. There was a couple of different ones that I worked at. One had nurses and one didn't have nurses. So today's vlog is all about how to give up your current job, whatever you're doing right now if it's not health care related, not nursing related, but how to give it up, change your career and get into care home working and become a health care assistant. First things first, I loved working in a care home. It was amazing. It was some of my best years. It's where I built my foundation of nursing on. It's where I learned all about the six seas of nursing. It's how I developed myself and become more confident in the role. It's just fantastic. It's such an amazing area and I really think that everyone should experience working in a care home. So you don't have to have experience to become a care assistant in a care home. Start thinking about your transferable skills. So wherever you're working at the minute, what sort of communication skills have you got? What sort of team working skills you've got? And use those skills to transfer over to the care home and how would you input those types of skills into the care home? So it's about that. It's about thinking, okay, what do you do now that you can transfer into a care home? Or you might have just left school maybe and looking at working in a care home. So you want to think about, again, communication. How did you communicate at school with friends, with the lecturers, your teachers, your headmaster or whatever? How was your time keeping and your time management, your organisational skills, these little sort of things you can easily transfer as a care home. Also any sort of experience that you have. So if you have your nan or grandad and you've looked after those people or the neighbours or anything like that, any sort of caring kind of roles that you've done, voluntary in your life, add that as well. My first big tip is just go for it. Literally just go for it. Stop what you're doing. Get online. Have a look for care home jobs or vacancies in your area. My second tip is get to know the role. So if you're on social media, you must be if you're watching this video, get out there, speak to people that actually have done the job and see what the role involves because you want to be well prepared before going into something like a care home to work. You want to sort of find out what sort of duties you'll be doing, what it involves, think about the personal care side of things and how you can maintain people's dignity and respect and all these sort of things you have to think about when you're applying for a care home. Just make sure you know the role so that when you apply for it, you can talk about it in a supporting information or if you get an interview, you can talk about it in the interview, what the role, what you expect the role to be like. It's just really good if you do your research beforehand because that'll make a whole lot of difference when you come to your interview. My next tip is make sure you research the place that you're applying to. So have a look online like I said, have a look at their website, what are their visions, what are their values, what do they pride themselves on, what do you like about the place, just something that really stands out for you. Pick out these little things so that when they ask you in the interview why do you want to apply here, you can just reel off a load of really good facts that you've found on their website and stuff. Have a look at their CQC rating as well, make sure that rating's quite good and just yeah, just get to know your care homes. You could also ring the local care homes to you and ask if you can go in and just have an informal look around and chat with people and that'll just give you a feel of what the care homes like, what the staff are like, what the residents are like that are living there. It'll just be an amazing idea I think to do that because that's going to make all the difference as well whether you want to work there or not and it also makes you look good. It looks, you look keen, you look interested in somebody so that's a really really good thing to do as well. So you don't really need any official qualifications to become a care assistant because most places will train you up. They'll put you through these sort of NVQs that you can do, health and social care courses, those sort of things. So most care homes will do that for you and they'll completely fully train you to do everything. When I applied for my very first care home, this is what they did with me so I didn't have very good GCSEs so I then went on and I got my English and maths again. I went on to do my NVQ, level two and then level three. So I was, the funding was there to give me the training so that was really really good. So just think about courses as well. Have a look online. You can have a look at open university as well. Maybe they've got some things that you could do. Have a look at Learn Direct. I don't know if they're still running anymore. Learn Direct is still running. I'll put it here if they are. I'm going to look after. Sorry guys. Have a look at your local colleges as well because colleges tend to do a lot of the courses as well and also that'll look good in your interview so if you're going and they say where do you see yourself in five years you can say oh well actually I've looked into this course and this course and I'm really interested in doing this career path that I just look much better as well in your interviewer thing if you're well prepared in that aspect as well. And some extra things that you might want to look around as well is things like look up dementia. Have a look around frailty, loneliness in the elderly. Have a look as well at different long-term conditions of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma and COPD. Also safeguarding. Safeguarding is a massive one because as you've seen maybe in the news and things that abuse does happen out there and you want to be stopping that so if you see anything like that going on make sure you shut that down, report it and you can do that completely anonymously so have a look who your local safeguarding teams are and just know a bit more about types of safeguarding and there's a whole safeguarding website actually to have a look at and it breaks it all down. I'm going to put a load of links below so any links I can think of I'm going to put below for you and hopefully they'll help you just make yourself aware of these sort of things when you're going into care homes. So just to summarize if you want to change your career and get into care literally just do it have a look around find your local care homes, inquire make sure you know your stuff do your research and yeah just apply and a huge huge good look to you. You've got this.