Your seasonal 2024 complex newsletter
A celebration of the work you do plus updates, information and useful guidance.
Welcome to the third edition of the Thornbury Community Services (TCS) Complex seasonal newsletter.
In this edition, we reflect on the last couple of months and celebrate the incredible work you and your colleagues have achieved and the high-quality care and support you have delivered to our clients in the community.
We’re excited to announce the launch of the new TCS website, featuring the newly designed Compass portal, where you can access everything needed to support your career. This website is built with your needs in mind, offering a more streamlined, user-friendly experience throughout your journey with TCS.
Additionally, we’ve created a new section on Compass dedicated to providing essential updates, clinical guidance, and resources to support your TCS career. This ensures everything is stored in one place and easily accessible for you to view and revisit whenever needed.
To explore these valuable resources and stay informed, simply click the button below to access the new section on Compass.
Quicklinks
A message from our Head of Service, Sarah
We’re thrilled to welcome our Head of Service, Sarah, back after her maternity leave, and we’re excited to have her rejoin the team. Sarah has shared a message below following her return giving a seasonal update and highlighting her key focuses moving forward.
Returning from maternity leave
I am delighted to return from maternity leave and rejoin such a dynamic business. During my time away, I have been inspired by the stories of the positive impact you have made on our clients’ lives.
Meeting new team members has been wonderful, and I am excited to engage with new clients and colleagues in the coming months.
Seasonal update
What a great few months we have had! Your efforts have enabled us to provide more hours of care than in the previous few months. Additionally, we are thrilled to welcome 78 new nurses and healthcare assistants to our TCS team.
Key focus going forward
My key focus going forward is to explore ways we can ensure we always provide care to all of our clients 100% of the time. This includes investing in you and ensuring all support, training, and correspondence are conducted in the best possible way.
To further support your career at TCS, we’re continually reviewing and updating Compass to ensure you have access to everything you need. We’ve already received some fantastic feedback, and we encourage you to share your thoughts using the feedback forms.
I hope you find this edition of the TCS Complex newsletter valuable, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
Celebrating you and your role
After a very successful past few months, we want to take this opportunity to reflect and celebrate the care you delivered to our clients and share a good news story about one of our TCS complex clients.
Last quarter, we delivered 138,122 hours of care to 86 clients and 4 new clients in the community.
Hours of care delivered to our clients
We delivered 138,122 hours of care to 86 adults and children in the community.
Thank you for contributing to this exceptional achievement. You played a crucial role in making this possible, and we look forward to seeing this number rise over the next few months, enabling us to support even more individuals in receiving care within their homes and communities.
How would you like to be celebrated in your newsletter?
If you have any ideas on how we can develop this section of the newsletter, please click the button below to share your feedback.
Or, if you’d like to shout out to a fellow colleague or clinical lead or even share a recent achievement of the client you care for, click the button below.
The difference you make
Ellis’s story
We’re delighted to share with you two client stories, our first is about Ellis, and his journey with TCS.
At just over three and a half years old, Ellis has already faced a very challenging young life, having been diagnosed with several complex medical conditions, including severe immunodeficiency and CHARGE association.
Since 2021, our team at TCS and our sister company Pulse Nursing at Home have had the privilege of providing care to Ellis, helping him navigate some of his toughest battles. When we first began working with Ellis, he required a tracheostomy and was on a ventilator overnight, which was successfully reversed in August of this year, marking a significant milestone. Despite Ellis’s challenges, his resilience, combined with the unwavering support from his family and our dedicated team, have been crucial.
Today, Ellis is thriving. He loves playing, going to nursery, and sharing cuddles. As a result of his remarkable improvement, Ellis no longer requires our services, and his care package has officially concluded.
His family’s experience with TCS and our sister company Pulse Nursing at Home has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are incredibly proud of the significant impact we’ve made in their lives. We strive to form meaningful relationships with families built on trust, ensuring that our work goes beyond medical care. We create an environment where clients and their loved ones feel safe, valued, and respected.
Ellis’s parents have kindly shared feedback with us about their experience.
“TCS has been really supportive in providing our son with the best care, nurses, and HCAs. Our experience is really positive, and we have built great relationships with our carers/nurses, who have become like family, helping us to take such good care of our son. It made us feel safe knowing his medical needs are being met and monitored in our home environment, where we have all our key comforts, and staff have always honoured our boundaries and respected our home.
Richard, Donna, and Emily have always been brilliant, always responsive, communicated well, and been open and honest. It’s made for a good working relationship as they are approachable and understanding.
Our overall experience with TCS has been very positive.”
As we celebrate Ellis’s success, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who have been part of Ellis’ journey and for your dedication to positively impacting his and his family’s lives.
By providing care at home services to adults and children we enhance their quality of life and support them to achieve their goals and ambitions. We’ve received some lovely photos capturing these meaningful moments of Ellis, his family, and support worker Hillary.
Jonathan’s story
Our second client story is about Jonathan and the wonderful trip he recently took to Cornwall with his care team.
The team at TCS has been supporting Jonathan for over ten years and he has been ventilator-dependent for some time. Tragically, during a trip, he contracted meningitis, which left him permanently paralysed from the neck down, requiring full-time care and a ventilator to breathe.
Despite these challenges, Jonathan has accomplished incredible personal goals with our support, including a ski trip to Chamonix, completing several fundraising activities for charity, and attending college to study media and photography.
Thank you to the healthcare professionals who provide support and care for Jonathan. Your dedication ensures we maintain the highest standards of care and continue to support clients like Jonathan in living fulfilling lives.
Supporting your wellbeing
As a care provider, we are committed to prioritising your wellbeing by ensuring you have the latest information, guidance, and resources to support you in your role at TCS, helping you to deliver the highest quality care to individuals in their own homes and communities.
Employee Assistance Programme
To ensure you have support whenever needed, we offer all our healthcare professionals access to our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), a personal support service dedicated to prioritising and supporting your wellbeing.
Available 24/7 throughout the year, the EAP connects you with professionally trained advisors who are able to help with a wide range of issues, including family challenges, marital concerns, financial or legal matters, stress, depression, and other personal or work-related difficulties.
You can access the Employee Assistance Programme welling resources and live chat by visiting pulsehealthcare.lifeworks.com and logging in using the following information:
Username/Company Code: Pulse
Password: Support
Or you can access the EAP 24/7 helpline by calling 0800 169 1920, quoting Pulse Healthcare Limited when you are put in touch with an advisor.
Patients experiencing a mental health crisis can now benefit from support through 111
England is one of the first countries in the world to offer access to a 24/7 full package of mental health crisis support through one single phone line.
People of all ages, including children, who are in crisis or concerned family and loved ones can now call 111, select the mental health option, and speak to a trained mental health professional.
Additional free mental health and emotional wellbeing support resources
This service offers free digital mental wellbeing support for adults across the UK. It includes professional support from accredited counsellors, peer-to-peer forums, and self-help tools like mood tracking and goal setting. No referral is needed, and it’s completely anonymous. Click here for more information and to sign up.
Mind provides various free mental health support services, including a 6-week guided self-help program. This program offers materials to help you understand and manage your feelings with regular practitioner check-ins. They also provide an online peer support community called Side by Side. Click here for more information.
You can access free talking therapies through the NHS. These services, also known as psychological wellbeing services, are available across the UK. In England, you might be able to refer yourself or ask your GP for a referral. Click here to refer yourself today.
They offer a free self-kindness toolkit designed to boost your wellbeing. This toolkit includes resources to help you manage your mental health and cope with stress and uncertainty. Click here for more information.
The mental health charity Mind provides a directory of mental health helplines you can contact for immediate support. You can call the Mind info line on 0300 123 3393 (UK).
NHS 111 also offers an urgent mental health helpline available 24/7.
The Hub of Hope is a comprehensive mental health support database created by the UK charity, Chasing the Stigma. It brings together local, national, peer, community, charity, private, and NHS mental health support services in one place. This platform aims to make it easier for people to find the help they need, whether in crisis or just looking for extra support. Click here for more information.
Our dedicated teams
We have a dedicated operational and clinical 24/7 support service for you to contact at any time you need. The team’s contact details are below, and they are available to support you when you needed.
Nurse career progression opportunities with TCS
If you’re a registered nurse looking to take the next step
in your TCS career, why not register your interest in our clinical lead nurse jobs using the button below.
Our clinical lead nurse vacancies are ideal for nurses looking for work from home nurse jobs that allow you to work closely with individuals receiving our care services and our passionate team of nurses, support workers, and healthcare assistants providing the care.
As a clinical lead nurse, you will focus on maintaining the highest standards of clinical excellence and ensuring clinical practice aligns with the organisation and national care guidelines for care delivered to individuals in their own homes. Alongside this, you will oversee all relevant health, safety, security and risk policies and procedures to ensure the people we support receive exceptional ‘Outstanding’ CQC-rated care at all times.
Share your feedback
Please share with us what you liked about our third edition of the seasonal newsletter and any ideas or suggestions of what you would like to see in your upcoming seasonal newsletters.
We’d appreciate your feedback, which you can provide by completing the short anonymous form below. We look forward to reviewing your ideas and suggestions.
Newsletter feedback
We’d love to hear about your experience with TCS so far, key highlights from your TCS career, and examples of the positive impact you’ve had on our clients in the community. Please spend a few minutes writing a quick review on Google.
Navigate to Compass
Compass is here to help you find all of the key information you need to navigate your career with us. Compass has everything you need from finding out more about your TCS benefits, to accessing your handbook, booking CPD courses, and preparing for your shifts.