It's National Carers Week 2020!
Anthony Dowding, head of training resources and development at the Education Academy, shares his experience of being a father and carer of two disabled children.
I am the father of two disabled children both of whom attend a mainstream school and I often get asked if it’s difficult. In this blog, I hope to give you some insight into what it’s like...
Firstly I have to say that I wouldn’t change my children for the world. It’s been a joy having them in my life and rising to the challenges life often puts in place.
For instance, last year we booked holiday to a resort in Turkey. We checked out the resort and were told that they had wheelchair accessible rooms. On arrival at the hotel, at around 2am (no idea why I always seem to arrive in the early hours of the morning) the receptionist took one look at the children and said they’d have to find us another room as we’d been put in one on the third floor of a block which didn’t have a lift! They didn’t have a spare room that night, so we agreed to take the room for the night and be moved the following day.
On leaving reception we found that there we’re no lifts from street level, where reception was, down to the ground floor which was three storeys below. Oh and the restaurant was on level 1. I spent the entire holiday lifting my son, 14, and his wheelchair up and down the stone steps to the restaurant. So a relaxing holiday in sunny Turkey, was a little more exhausting than I planned!
These simple things I find happen every day. If we want to go anywhere the first question is “Is it wheelchair accessible?” The next questions are, is it flat, do they have lifts and disabled toilets? The list goes on.
Appointments are another issue for me. One year I used almost half of my annual leave entitlement taking my children to hospital appointments and staying close to the Evelina Children’s Hospital where one of them was having surgery.
After an exhausting day of work most people can go home and relax, for me it’s like having a second job. In fact for most carers, whether they look after disabled children, or are looking after older adults, work doesn’t stop when we finish at Barts. Quite often we find we “work” for another 4-5 hours, maybe longer when we get home. Sometimes it even carries on through the night and just when you think you can finally get some rest the alarm goes off and it’s time to get up and go to work again.
Carers need time, time to recover, time for themselves, time for a holiday. Organisational policies often don’t take into consideration these additional duties carers have to perform. These duties aren’t a choice, we often can’t get help or our circumstances don’t fit neatly into a tick box and so we’re left to it.
Barts Carers Network has been set up to give us a voice, somewhere to turn to for support, for guidance and somewhere to find people who understand the issues we face.
8-14 June 2020 is national carers week, but there are also plenty of charities out there who can also offer support to carers.
The Barts inclusion team have produced a Staff Carer Network Survey to help better understand who in our workforce, is a carer and identify the impact of unpaid caring responsibilities on our staff. Please follow the link to complete the survey.
