Oliver Rickard

In Achieve together I have worked in lots of different homes supporting people with a variety of conditions but I have been based in 1 house where I work 1 to 1 doing sleep shifts, My shifts are very different each week, sometimes doing 2-3 shifts per week, I do back to back sleeps occasionally as well as working weekends.

The person I support displays challenging behaviours, he is nonverbal, with severe learning difficulty and autism, we have 2 to 1 in the community as he can self harm or harm staff/members of public.

I support him in getting lunch and dinner from shops, we do activities such as Highbury disco, trampolining, boat trips, long walks to the hoe for ice cream, playing with a football in the park and helping out with dinner and household cleaning, I have also been on holiday with him to Looe caravan park.

I administer medication, I don't do personal care with him but I do still help him maintain personal hygiene, I prompt him to clean and scrub areas and I support him with brushing his teeth.

I am his keyworker and I help plan activities make sure his appointments have been booked and we arrive on time, I have helped maintain a healthy balanced diet for him and supported him in his weight loss while remaining person centred and still giving him all the freedom to chose his meals and activities.

I feel through experience I have become better adjusted to listening to and understanding the person I support. I have seen him become more confident to ask me for activities and specific meals aswell as our relationship growing stronger seeing him become more playful dancing and singing together more often.

At the building sites I worked at I managed day-to-day labour duties including heavy lifting, goods transportation and site maintenance. I had to think ahead bringing equipment and resources to the correct places while not being directly ordered to because the riggers were multiple lifts high.

I focused on health and safety preventing equipment from becoming a safety hazard, equipment can fall on people or becoming a trip hazard or obstruction which had to be taken seriously.

I worked full time 40h work weeks for DDC, this required me to make the scaffolders job as easy as possible such as loading the vans before a job and helping to load them when taking jobs down.

My skills of working in a team were further improved as we would always have 3 or more people to each job, this meant I would be labouring for lots of different people in 1 day which relied on good listening skills and clear communication.

At Mc Donald's I worked on the shop floor addressing customer complaints and dealing with dissatisfaction regarding food and hygiene, due to my store being at the top of town we would become very busy with a variety of people coming in, many customers have became violent or aggressive towards other customers, myself and staff. I have frequently had to deal with large groups of teenagers causing trouble as Mc donalds attracts lots of young people in the holidays and drunk people in the evenings.

I would attentively help a large volume of customers every day with positive attitude and focus on customer satisfaction developing strong relationships with the customers watching to see if customers needed assistance while also balancing the priority of making sure the store is clean.

I was responsible for closing the shop floor and making sure toilets, staff room and stairs were mopped and clean before leaving and I worked closely with the security informing them of concerns and making sure customers felt at ease.