Facing Lockdown

23rd March 2020 spelled either the end of or the start of something. Whichever way you choose to look at it, life for the foreseeable future was to be different to what has gone before.

This post should really have gone up soon after this date, but as with many charities across the UK, the Carers’ Centre was facing the challenges of a reduced workforce, a need to adapt to new ways of working and, most importantly, a need to adapt what we were doing to remain relevant to carers. It’s taken a while to get back to a new normal!

But we have been working and we have been innovating over the last few months, as have many. Now seems a good time to share how we approached the challenges we faced, and what action we took. Others will have done similar, some will have taken a different tack. We want to both share our approach and hear from others so we can continue learn and adapt what we have done. We’ve made mistakes, and we’d probably do some things differently if we had the chance. But we hope sharing our experience will be of interest and use. So: what did we do?!

Our first action was to step back and consider our mission & goals as an organisation. Were they still relevant to today? In actual fact, we felt that recognising and supporting carers was more relevant than ever. With lockdown, carers were less likely to have formal or informal support around them, which could only increase the burden many were facing. Work done by Carers UK since has confirmed this, see their Behind Closed Doors report. It was vital we continue to offer support which was relevant to a lockdown situation. However, how we did this had to change. Although our 5 organisational goals were still valid, it felt that they needed to be translated to more meaningful short term goals for the current situation.

We therefore re-visioned our short term work in to 3 priority areas:

• Reassure and promote carers’ access to clear and trusted information and advice
• Rapidly develop, pilot, evaluate and roll out new ways for carers to maintain their wellbeing and stay connected
• Support & engage with the B&NES Compassionate Community Hub to ensure carers can access help from within their local community.

Each priority area had further goals developed within it, and we set about delivering what we hoped was a relevant response to carers. Feedback so far has been positive and we feel we’re on the right track at least. Upcoming blog posts will give more detail on our journey, both good and bad(!). We hope you find them a useful read.