There’s always that one carer in every nursing home isn’t there? Or in my case there’s a whole bunch of them! I’m back at the Sunshine Retirement Village (Charisma called it my quarterly bonus) and I was quite excited to see all the residents and the staff again. Well in the case of the staff that lasted all of five minutes after handover. For reasons known only to them, they had decided to punish me for my absence for the past few weeks. How did I know this? The long silences, sideways glances and no break allocated for me of course! I had a think about how to approach it while I did the morning meds. Thankfully the residents hadn’t been informed of the punishment conspiracy and they all seemed pleased to see me. It took a while longer to do the medication round as most people wanted to chat and I seemed to get caught up in adjusting stockings and untangling rollers from hair, but it didn’t matter, I would just start the dinner time meds a little later. By the end of the ...

Being sent to different nursing homes is starting to become the normal way of working now. Charisma from the nursing agency has sent me somewhere different again; and so I’m getting used to starting from scratch every few shifts. This time it was on a unit in a ‘challenging behaviour’ home she was sending me to, and I could almost feel her glee as she imagined them chewing me up and spitting me out. She likes to label does our Charisma, what with her 'EMI' and her 'challenging behaviour', maybe the agency ought to send her on a course labelled 'Challenging ignorance – for dummies who misjudge other people’? So I arrived at this new nursing home and as usual headed straight up to the nurses office. My welcome could only be described as frosty, as this huge bear of a man, wearing a belt full of keys like a prison warden, looked at me in surprise for what seemed like a full minute. He then proceeded to bark at me in a confused way asking who the hell I wa...