We regularly assist local agencies by providing decluttering, organising and life admin services to their service users. We have a wealth of experience working with individuals from all backgrounds and with various personal challenges both mentally and physically. Our team are patient and understanding and will work with you to find the best solution for your service user.
Helping social workers find solutions for their service users
We have a long history of working with Social Services all across the North West. Often a social worker knows a service user needs help and wants to facilitate them to be more independent and organised in their home. That's where we can step in and provide support, empathy and expertise to get a project over the line or provide more permanent support.
The Problem
Jenny is a 79 year old lady living in Stockport and primary carer to her husband who has dementia alongside a diverse range of health conditions. Her days are long and hard as she needs to be companion, cook, carer and wife to her husband when she is already struggling herself. The pulls on her time mean she is struggling to keep on top of the paperwork coming in relating to hospital appointments and general home maintenance. She knows she needs to have a tighter grasp of finance too because she fears what's around the corner. Social Services are helping her with certain things when they visit but their appointments are limited. David is in receipt of Direct Payments.
Social Services called us and asked us to assist Jenny and David. First, we had a consultation to work out what the critical problems were and how Jenny felt we could best help. Jenny wanted a filing system set up to keep track of David's medical appointments. She was completely overwhelmed with the volumes of letters and also emails coming in. She wanted it to be easy to use for her and any carers that might be helping. She felt money was slipping through the net because she hadn't been able to check on renewals coming up for years and so she asked us to do a complete audit of her finances.
In short she wanted to feel in control and get her hands on what she needed to when she needed it. The goal was to spend more of her precious time with David and less worrying about losing money and missing appointments.
The Solution
We met Jenny and David at their home with their social worker. The initial consultation was all about building trust so they felt comfortable opening up their personal paperwork, emails and private health documentation to us. Then we chatted through what the priorities were for paperwork and filing. We reviewed the current systems of life admin and paperwork to establish what was working and what needed to change and made some suggestions. We arranged an appointment at a time that would work well for Jenny and David and agreed on a shorter 3 hour session to be mindful of Jenny's responsibilities with David's care.
Once the project was underway we worked through the paperwork, decluttered what wasn't required and created a new filing system for domestic and household admin - easy to manage with clear labelling. We also created a brand new system for health paperwork and categorised based on David's diverse medical issues.
We looked at digital filing too to get Jenny's 3000 unread emails deleted, filed and unsubscribed as appropriate. We also changed anything over into Jenny's name that had previously been in David's. We set up a password manager for Jenny so she could easily log on to without wasting precious time.
Once all the filing was sorted, we moved on to general life admin and started to look at pricing for renewals. We took over phone communication once Jenny had gone through security procedures and sorted out savings in most areas. We also identified things they were paying for and not using. In total we saved them over £600 per year.
We schedule monthly visits for a couple of hours to keep on top of things for Jenny and we can always work remotely when needed.
It's one less thing for Jenny to worry about.
The above case study is quite typical although we work with all manner of physical and mental health issues. Life throws things in the way which means paperwork is neglected and becomes out of control. It can cause stress levels to go through the roof and can be a real problem for many people. They reach out to Social services for help but paperwork is not a quick job. It takes time and knowledge to do effectively. Finding someone thorough, methodical, trustworthy and kind is the solution. That's exactly what we do at Life ADDmin.
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