Home care manager appointed to key role

​When Hayley Claxton decided on a complete change of career she switched from caring for plants to caring for people.

Now she has progressed to take up the role of managing both offices for award-winning Norfolk home care firm Extra Hands. 

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Hayley had spent 20 years working in a horticultural nursery after leaving school, but when she was made redundant she decided to take a different path.

After initially working in a care home, she decided to apply for a job at Extra Hands. In 2013, she joined the family-run company - which provides a variety of home care visit packages across Norfolk, to suit all requirements and budgets - and her career has soared ever since.

Hayley said: “It was quite a career change but I love care work. It is about providing care and support for people and making them feel at ease and secure and that nothing is ever too much trouble.

“Our focus is whatever we can do to try and help, we will do that.

“It is very rewarding, especially when you get people who require some help, but we have then managed to rehabilitate them in their own home and they can reduce the amount of calls they are having from us, or they are well enough to manage on their own.”

Hayley initially worked for a year as a carer for Extra Hands, which provides a wellbeing check service - the first of its kind in Norfolk - that provides short visits to check up on care users when friends and family are unable to make the visit, giving everyone peace of mind.

She then took on the position of rapid response carer, which involves meeting service users and their families to set up care packages, as well as providing back-up support to colleagues.

After a couple of years, she was appointed as care co-ordinator, which involves managing and planning the rota of carers and visits for service users.

When a vacancy came up for registered manager at the firm’s Broadland office, she successfully applied for that job.

And when the manager of the Heacham office left last year, she was asked to consider being registered manager of both offices.

Hayley said she was keen to take up the challenge and having one manager for both the offices means staff being able to work more closely together.

“My role is overseeing that everything is running smoothly, the day-to-day overseeing and running of both offices,” she said.

“I spend half of my week in Broadland and half of my week in Heacham, but I am really flexible and I go where I am needed at the time, which I like.

“Although the company ran as one before, having two different managers in the different settings we had different ideas of how to run things. 

“Now I am managing both offices and I can implement the same procedures in both offices, so we are running together now so well. 

“If one office needs support, the other can easily help.”

Hayley has never regretted her career switch and says Extra Hands, which has run for almost 30 years, is a great company to work for.

“We know everybody by name, it’s nice that even when they phone in you know their voices so you have got that familiarity with everybody,” she said.
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“It is a family run company and they are fantastic people to work for - they are so caring and supportive of everybody.”