What Qualities Do You Need to be a Care Assistant?

If you’re curious about a career in care but wondering what qualities you need to be a care assistant, this is the post for you.

For many people who work in the care industry, life there feels less like a job and much more like a calling. If you have the ‘caring bone’ as we like to call it, looking after people just comes naturally. But that’s not to say it’s always easy!

Care work will challenge you to grow, see things from other people’s perspectives, and develop deeper levels of skills you sometimes take for granted, like listening and communication.

However, for those who naturally have those care assistant qualities, each customer visit can genuinely feel like a real gift; helping people rediscover their independence, and achieve a level of contentment they might have worried was no longer possible.

So, if you’re curious about a career in care but wondering what qualities you need to be a care assistant, this is the post for you.

What skills and qualities do you need to be a care worker?

The UK National Careers Service lists nine key skills and qualities of a care worker – and we have to say, we agree with each and every one of them!

Here, we’ll delve into those care assistant qualities and explain how you’d use them on a daily basis as a Bluebird Care home carer.

1. Sensitivity and understanding

Perhaps the most important of all qualities of a care worker is a natural and instinctive affinity for empathy. In every shift, our carers see the situation their customer is dealing with, and instantly default to understanding their emotions. That innate ability to put themselves in the other person’s shoes and imagine how they’d feel in that situation is something you can’t be taught. But if you feel it effortlessly, and on a profound level, then you already have one of the qualities of a good healthcare assistant that’s most sought after in our industry.

2. A desire to help people

The second fundamental quality of a good healthcare assistant is that once you feel that empathy for someone, you also find yourself wanting make their life better. You might have experienced that by helping a relative recover from an injury. Or you may be the kind of person who instinctively offers to give up your seat for an older person on a bus or train. If so, then these acts, and ones like them, show you have the natural qualities of a care worker.

3. The ability to work well with others

Care work can sometimes feel like a virtuoso pursuit as you drive from customer to customer, but the best care workers are actually expert team players.

Firstly, this is because they see each customer call not as ‘looking after’ someone, but as working with that customer as a team to make sure they can do all of the things they want, and be in the very best of spirits while doing them.

Secondly, however, our carers also appreciate that their role fits into a larger care plan for each customer. For example, our live-in care service offers 24-hour, round the clock care provided by more than one care assistant. This means that at the end of each shift, the outgoing carer will need to communicate what the incoming carer needs to know about the previous day or night, so they can be prepared to offer the best level of service possible.

Likewise, our office team may need to make adjustments to a customer’s care plan as their health challenges evolve, and will seek guidance from our carers when making those decisions. And that’s not even considering informal advice, formal training, and the emotional support our care assistants give each other daily!

One of the core qualities of a care worker is therefore to think about what others need and deliver it – whether it’s a customer they’re providing care to, or a fellow team member who relies on their experience and expertise.

4. Patience and the ability to remain calm in stressful situations

Caring can be truly wonderful, allowing you to hear a customer’s stories, aid them in getting out and about, and generally making their life as full as it can be. It’s not always that way, however, and how you handle the challenges can really tell you if you have the qualities of a good healthcare assistant.

Anyone can have a bad day, and carers are certainly not infallible! However, our longest-serving and most experienced care workers will tell you that grace under pressure is certainly possible. If you naturally have the patience to deal with people when they’re in a bad mood, there’s a good chance you have the care assistant qualities needed to manage a customer with dementia who’s having a bad day. It’s a fantastic foundation for a career in care, and our Bluebird training will help you deal with the finer details of the job’s daily challenges.

5. The ability to accept criticism and work well under pressure

This point is, in many ways, a continuation of the one above it. Care is a career in which you’re always learning, and sometimes that means making mistakes and accepting feedback around it. That can be particularly tricky to do in high-pressure situations where someone’s health is on the line, but being open to that and learning to do it with grace and a genuine smile on your face is one of the key qualities of a good healthcare assistant.

6. To be thorough and pay attention to detail

On any given day, our carers might have to respond to adjustments on a customer’s care plan; log a time when their customer went off baseline; administer specific dosages of medication; and note the (sometimes innocuous) things a customer says which could reveal their mood and happiness levels are worryingly low. It can be a lot to take in, but having the qualities above, together with a thorough attention to detail, can make all the difference. That’s why it’s one of the core skills and qualities of a care worker.

7. Customer service skills

This might be one of the qualities of a care worker you think goes without saying. After all, caring is a customer-facing role. But seeing a customer take a turn for the worse can certainly test your ability to stay calm, composed and professional.

Additionally, one of the aspects of care that gets less attention is talking to potential new customers. Whether it’s answering the phone, talking to someone at our head office, or being approached by someone on the street who wants to know about care availability, donning a Bluebird Care outfit means being prepared to talk to people from all walks of life. If you can do that and treat them with care, respect and compassion, while being knowledgeable, helpful and meeting their needs, you have a crucial care assistant quality that care companies are currently crying out for.

8. Excellent verbal communication skills

Another of the core skills and qualities of a care worker is something you might take for granted. After all, almost everyone can convey information verbally. But can you do it in a way that’s calm, kind, and easy for people to understand?

This can be challenging on a Bluebird’s day-to-day, as they find themselves dealing with customers experiencing mood swings or even violent outbursts. Thankfully, those instances are few and far between. As a carer, most of the time you’ll be helping people dress, move, eat and find the joy in their daily life.

It’s here where the joy of those excellent verbal skills can really present itself for our carers. They regularly tell us how much they love hearing our customer’s stories of remarkable lives, incredibly well-lived. Simply being a deep listener and good conversationalist can make those interactions all the more enjoyable for both our carers and customers alike.

9. To be able to carry out basic tasks on a computer or hand-held device

The last of the important care assistant qualities we look for here at Bluebird Care Bournemouth and Poole is a solid level of proficiency with modern technology. We definitely don’t need our carers to be techno-wizzes. However, the role of a care assistant does involve logging important information from care visits on our system, like medications administered and important changes in a customer’s health. If you can comfortably manage a smartphone, then that’s another box you’ve ticked on the list of the qualities of a care worker.

Do you have the care assistant qualities we’re looking for?

Here at Bluebird Care Bournemouth & Poole, we’re actively on the lookout for kind, caring, compassionate people with the core skills and qualities of a care worker. So if you read this article and spent the entire time saying “that’s me!” we’d love to hear from you!

To find out more, see our current list of open Bournemouth and Poole carer jobs, or get in touch with us to chat about what being a carer really looks like.

 

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