In this month’s Dean Healthcare blog we want to introduce you to one of our Healthcare Assistants, Paige! She has recently started fundraising for The Sick Children's Trust, a charity which is close to her heart, as well as her time at Dean Healthcare and what she enjoys about working with us.

How long have you been working at Dean Healthcare?

Coming up to almost a year, I moved to Bristol about a year ago and I got a job with Dean Healthcare right afterwards, and I loved it so much and it worked for me that I just stayed and didn’t look for anything else!

What do you enjoy most about working for Dean Healthcare

The big thing for me, is the flexibility. I do acting and music on the side so the fact that I can work 40+ hours one week and none the next is great. The team are so lovely, so welcoming and very understanding. If there’s a week where I’m very overwhelmed and I’m like, please, I just need a bit of time to myself, they’ll let me have my moment and then, when I’m back, they’re like ‘where do you want to work and what do you want to do?’ and there’s shifts all the time. If I want to work at night one day, I’ve got a shift. If I want to work in the day. And there’s so many different services to work for that if you ever feel like ‘ooh, this type of service isn’t working for me’, there’s so many more than you can always find something that really works well for you!

What do you enjoy about work at Dean Healthcare?

I really, really like agency work! A lot of these homes I’ve worked at have offered me full-time positions and I’ve said no, because I love agency so much! I love the flexibility, I love the fact that I can go to different places and I can meet so many new people, and you also get a bit of solidarity between the agency workers because you see them lots at different homes. And you make really good friends, you see them in the office. I love the fact that you get to experience so many different things and not feel super restricted and there’s always shifts and with agency work. People often have this idea that you can’t get work if you’re an agency worker. There’s no pressure to take up a certain amount of shifts with Dean Healthcare. If you tell them ‘I don’t want to work much this month’ that’s completely fine and they’re always happy when you want to jump back in!

Why did you choose to fundraise for The Sick Children’s Trust?

Okay, so I grew up in the hospital quite a lot, I had hip dysplasia, so I was very, very fortunate that my family could stay around me during that time, but for a lot of families, especially a lot of less well-off families, they have to spend hundreds of pounds on hotels and sleeping cars outside the hospitals, so this organisation means that those families can stay close to their child. They have counselling in home, they have lovely homes across the country for different families, and I think it’s really, really food, to support not just the child in hospital, but the family, so they can provide the child with the most love and attention and spend as much time as possible with them, especially during a hard period of their life.

Why did you choose a skydive for your fundraising efforts?

It’s just so exciting and unusual! I’m sure a lot of people fundraise in many different ways and it’s great to fundraise in any way you can. But I feel it’s such an exciting and interesting way to fundraise. A lot of people are like ‘ooh this is strange, let me research into why you’re doing this’ and I’ve been wanting to skydive for a long time and I started researching into local skydives and I realised that I can do it for charity, so I thought, why not throw myself out of a plane and make some money for a good cause!

How can people donate to your fundraising?

You can either find it with my link, or you can go through the charity itself and donate there. We’re aiming for £400 and we’ve raised £70 so far, so it’s going well. If you don’t want to donate to the skydive specifically just a donation to the charity would be great and there’s so much information on the website.

We hope you've enjoyed reading more about Paige's experience and her fundraising efforts. If you'd like to support Paige with her charity skydive, you can visit her JustGiving page below

SUPPORT PAIGE HERE