Meet Tracy Sullivan, Senior Carer – KarePlus

Tracy Sullivan likes to keep moving. She is a senior care worker in Havering, and works long shifts, five days a week. For many years she worked in a care home, but she is happier now in homecare, moving around, discovering new places. Movement has always been part of Tracy’s life, having grown up on a traveller site in Huntingdon. Single, and with her four children themselves grown up, Tracy is again more nomadic. She has moved house eight times in three years, and she knows that she won’t stop still for long.

For Tracy, the freedom to move is worth the associated moments of loneliness or invisibility. Despite moving often, Tracy always finds work. She has the right skills and stories, and a folder of purring references. Where she is now, at a franchise of Kare Plus in Havering, Tracy is a key lieutenant. She is in charge of client assessments and reviews, she trains staff and she provides support to colleagues in elements of care such as medication management.

There is a nomadic invisibility to Tracy’s professional life too, despite all her expertise. After twenty-five years working in care, Tracy has done a lot of training, but she has not a single care qualification. Tracy is well used to the lack of recognition care staff receive, but that does not stop it being a waste.

The Care City Test Bed programme enabled us to work with homecare staff and their managers to develop an enhanced service, about spotting ill-health early, and escalating only the right patients to the right clinician with the right data, using Whzan. It wasn’t easy. When we offered homecare staff the chance of a more complicated work day, some chuckled and shook their heads. Their care jobs were just one of the many things they were juggling in their lives. Some GPs were sceptical too. And when we talked about care staff escalating patients to GPs, one sighed and said, ‘ah, great, a different number to phone and not be listened to!’

However, other homecare staff leapt at the chance. Among them was Tracy Sullivan. Daunted at first, after ninety minutes of training, she started to believe that she could do it. And with Tracy’s experience, she knew the difference it might make to her service users. Tracy is now a confident Expert Carer, and during COVID-19 – with her clients struggling to access healthcare – was able to spot a client with dangerously high blood pressure, preventing them becoming seriously unwell by alerting their GP.

While that experience particularly will stay with Tracy, the biggest difference it has made for her is relational. For the first time, she has had conversations with colleagues like district nurses that felt like ‘two professionals discussing a client’. That’s after twenty five years of experience, and just ninety-minutes training.

Excerpt from A Healthy Living – Four Stories from the future of Care