A Sensitive Environment: Moving a Care Home

Published by Go2Removals -

Removal companies, such as ours, have to be prepared to work on jobs in all environments. We recently discussed a job at a storage centre in London that presented a number of challenges, but we also took away a lot of lessons, some of which we brought to this next case study which involved some internal moving at a care home in Fulham.

If you’ve even glanced at the news in the last 18 months, you’ll know that care homes are under a lot of strain already, and their residents have been some of the most vulnerable during the pandemic. This meant we needed to give this job additional thought to ensure we were always complying with safety regulations while still being able to carry out our work quickly and efficiently.

Having recently seen the benefit of bodycams from the storage centre job, we continued wearing them for this job too as it ensures we’re fully accountable and have video footage of our team carrying out their work.

Safety for our staff as well as the staff and residents of the care home was of the utmost importance. While most of our team was already fully vaccinated, those who weren’t completed a Lateral Flow Test each morning. This let us know they were safe to work in the sensitive environment of the care home.

As well as the safety of the residents, we also wanted to respect their right to live in a calm, quiet home. We worked to set times to keep our impact on the residents’ daily lives minimal, and agreed times for each room to be completed, which we always kept to. There was an additional challenge in that the care home also had builders working in it, so we liaised with them to not only ensure we weren’t getting in each others’ way, but also to keep noise and movement to a minimum for the residents.

While there were lots of simple items to move, some of the more complex items included dismantling and reassembling hospital beds which are made of heavy, high-grade materials and required additional effort from our team. At the end of each day we provided the client with an inventory of all the items we’d moved, so they knew exactly how much progress we’d made and how much was left to do.

All in all this was an interesting and important job to work on. It taught us a lot about working in an environment where the residents are vulnerable and require minimal impact to their lives. The lessons we’ve learnt from this job will stay with us, and mean that we can confidently complete similar projects in the future.