Innovative angels eye national award

Roxie Taj, managing director of Visiting Angels has been named as a finalist in the Great British Care Awards

The managing director of a care company working within Rochdale that encourages its staff to treat clients “as if they were family” has been named as a finalist in the Great British Care Awards.

Visiting Angels delivers such a dedicated service to people with care needs including disabilities, dementia, and terminal illness, that it even allows the person being cared for to interview and vet their carer. This is vital for people from diverse communities who sometimes feel ashamed that they need looking after.

And Visiting Angels has a carer-centric approach to its staff – with employees at the company receiving an annual pay rise and having a career path planned for them. Even their cars are serviced regularly for free.

All of which has landed the company's managing director Roxie Taj, a place in the care innovator award category of the Great British Care Awards, being held at Birmingham International Conference Centre on 22 March, and a date with presenter, Rylan Clark.

“Our ambition for the franchise is to be the care employer of choice by 2030, one which everyone wants to work for,” said Roxie Taj. “These two things go together. It is all about building a relationship with your client and that can only be achieved with time and familiarity. Just as Asian people have uncles and aunties in their community who are not blood relatives, we want them to be like another member of the family – as far as professionalism will allow.”

The social care system in Britain has endured a huge crisis, before, during and after the pandemic. There are still 152,000 unfilled vacancies in the profession and the turnover rate for staff is almost twice the national average.

Fellow founder Badar Usmani says: “It is bizarre how while older people slowdown in their lives, councils expect their carers to speed up. It often boils down to a care assessor looking at a client’s needs and believing carers are only there to give out medication and check things are okay. They think that can be as little as 15 minutes work but sometimes it can take 15 to just get the person 'with it'.

“Furthermore, 'companionship' doesn’t exist in the council’s dictionary. High volume care is commissioned to 'cheaper' providers who then offload onto carers with back-to-back client calls and minimum wage. Carers are given little, or no travel time and mileage is not paid. So, a carer could be out for six hours but only paid for four 'working' hours.

Consequently, good carers are forced to adopt bad habits resulting in the public perception of care as bad overall.”

Badar continued: “It should be about establishing trust, confidence, and relationships, not who can finish first. Visiting Angels deliver a minimum one-hour visit and place a greater value on the benefit of companionship. Visiting Angels will collaborate with local councils if they raise their standards to ours, which means providing the resource to help us pay higher wages and improve our retention.”

Badar and Roxie are aiming to use the award to continue with their carer-centric approach to make caring and carers count – with both seeing them as, “the original front-line workers before medical professionals.”