If the past two years has taught us anything at all it’s that people working on the frontline of our emergency and healthcare services are often the thin line that separates life and death.
As each of us has picked navigated our own way through the hardship, challenges, fears and frustrations of the pandemic it has been impossible not to have been affected by the exhausted, despairing faces looking into news cameras and telling us of desperate hours worked on Covid wards and intensive care units trying to protect and save lives.
Away from the blue lights, sirens and chaotic scenes unfolding in and around our hospitals a community of other frontline workers have battled their own versions of these events.
In care homes, residential homes and in people’s own homes around the country, an army of care workers have often been the only link to outside world for the sick, the vulnerable and the elderly.
The difference, of course, is that for these amazing and dedicated people, chronic infirmity and sickness, and death, are not just the constant backdrop to their working lives, but the reason they get up and go to work in the first case.
Whether they work in care establishments or visit those in need of care and support in their own home, our care workers are the unsung heroes and heroines of the social care crisis that has been raging far longer than the health crisis that has engulfed us since last March.
And it will outlive that health crisis by many, many years.
That’s why we are so proud to become an official sponsor and supporter of the Care Workers Charity (CWC).
Because what we often forget is that while our army of care workers do so much for others, it is often they themselves who are in desperate need of our help.
The CWC was founded in 2009 with a mission to prevent care workers from falling into financial hardship.
For more than a decade, the charity has supported thousands of individuals working in social care with hardship grants to help them cope with emergencies such as loss of income, illness, homelessness and bereavement.
In 2020, it paid out more than £2.2 million in grants to support 3,000 care workers who faced acute hardship through no fault of their own.
And the charity has now expanded its ambitions and support to work in partnership with mental health experts Red Umbrella to protect not just the financial wellbeing of those employed in social care, but also their emotional health through access to free counselling.
At Your Comms Group we supply handsets, connectivity and device management solutions to many organisations involved in providing non-hospital health care on the frontline, so we have seen at first hand the way care workers can change lives.
Whether it’s helping people to stay independent in their own homes for longer, safeguarding their dignity in failing health, providing companionship or reassurance to the lonely and the fearful, or simply holding someone’s hand in their last moments of life, these are people we are proud to support and help in whatever small way we can.
For us, this partnership with CWC is not just about providing meaningful and tangible support for a cause we care deeply about. It’s about us holding up a mirror to our own values and living what we believe in.
We are extraordinarily grateful for the work our care workers do, and it’s a privilege to support them in this way.
