When talking to parents I often get into conversation and passion takes over; I suddenly find myself making statements like,

“we believe Home From Home Care is as good as it gets for the particular people we support, BUT we know we can always be better”.

The reality is that when that conversation is over, I endlessly question myself as to how on earth I could have set that expectation, how the hell we can be better, what is it that we can do to move the service on?  This focus to constantly strive to be better not only comes from Ann, Hugo and me getting up every morning and asking ourselves those questions, but I know is what drives our management team, too.

Recently, one of my team said to me, you know, I think Home From Home Care could be the largest parent led residential care provider in the UK. And I thought about it and I thought of all the challenges over the last 7 years. And I thought, that’s ok, but bigger isn’t necessarily good. Making a difference to the lives of those we support and their families is what we are all about. So I went back to my computer and asked myself those questions over again, what can we do better, what can we do to move the service on.

But earlier today I had a long conversation with my operations manager who was feeling quite frustrated with me because I had raised a couple of issues that I thought we needed to address. He made the very valid point that we don’t do enough to celebrate our achievements, we (the family) tend to focus on what’s not quite right and try to put it right. We’ve new systems in development, more rooms in planning, an expanding staff team and even more ideas about improving what we do. But we’ve not stopped for breath in 7 years. It’s always about the next thing.

So I’m taking an hour or two out to think about how we can celebrate NOT the fact that we might be the largest parent led provider of residential care in the UK RATHER that this has come about as a result of the hard work of our 180 staff in constantly striving to enable and empower the people we support to lead as fulfilled lives as possible, filled with opportunity.