Healthcare Support Workers or Healthcare Assistants work alongside colleagues in clinical teams to provide essential support and deliver high quality patient care.
Healthcare Support Workers or Healthcare Assistants work in various NHS and Social Care settings including hospitals, care homes, community settings, hospices and patients’ own homes.
Healthcare Support Workers or Healthcare Assistants have a diverse role and their responsibilities can include:
- Providing personal care – Assisting patients with daily tasks like washing, dressing, and feeding, ensuring their dignity and comfort.
- Basic Observations – Taking temperatures, blood pressure, and pulse, recording details in patient records and providing vital information to nurses and doctors.
- Maintaining a clean and safe environment – Ensuring patient rooms are kept tidy and equipment is clean and ready for other staff.
- Provide clinical assistance – Assisting with clinical tasks such as caring for wounds, providing medication sometimes take blood samples under supervision from Registered Nursing staff.
- Offering emotional support – Providing a listening ear and a reassuring presence to patients and their families.
Most healthcare support workers or healthcare assistants roles have lots of face to face contact with patients and communication is key as well as having a caring nature and being interested in working closely with people.
To be employed in any clinical support role you will need to demonstrate a good standard of literacy and numeracy and for some roles, employers may ask for GCSE’s or equivalent in maths and English. Digital skills and qualifications are also highly sought after as many NHS and Social Care settings rely on IT based systems to manage their databases and patient information. You would also need to demonstrate positive time management, communication and organisational skills for any healthcare support role.
Working for the NHS or for Social Care in Mid and South Essex provides many opportunities to develop your skills further and there are a wide range of apprenticeship, in-house training and continuing professional development opportunities available that you can use to build your career. Working as a healthcare support workers or healthcare assistant is often a stepping stone on the pathway to other careers including midwifery, nursing or the allied health professions.
There are also opportunities to develop your career in a clinical support role by taking on additional responsibility and you could become a team leader, supervisor or move into management. There are also development opportunities to move to to healthcare support roles in the wider healthcare teams or you could choose to specialise in a particular area such as accident and emergency, older patients, stroke, outpatients, children’s etc.