Lancashire carer dances into nationwide competition

A Lancashire home carer has danced his way into a nationwide competition to showcase talent within the health and social care sector.

Recently promoted to field care supervisor, Paul Wilson works for the Blackpool office of fast-growing home care company Alcedo Care Group.

Since the beginning of this year, Paul has delivered therapeutic dance sessions to Alcedo Care clients across the Lancashire region, either dancing for them or with them, to raise their spirits, give them an emotional release and help them manage their lockdown stresses.

At the same time, Paul used his knowledge of the physical and mental health benefits of dance to develop a research project establishing how dance can safely be integrated into a domiciliary setting and how dance can improve and enrich the lives of home care clients that has been recognised with a First Class Degree in Dance from Edge Hill University.

Based on the results of his research, Paul made a series of recommendations outlining how dance can be adopted into all domiciliary settings to improve the lives of home care clients; something that Alcedo Care is now incorporating widely across its regional offices. 

Paul’s project was spotted by an industry magazine and he has been invited to go forward into the forthcoming ‘Care Sector’s Got Talent’ competition, which is organised by Championing Social Care, the volunteer group behind the Sparkle for Social Care campaign, and is open to individual carers and care teams across the country.

Managing director at Alcedo Care, Andy Boardman said: “We are constantly looking at ways to improve and enhance the exceptional service that we provide to our home care clients and were delighted to help facilitate Paul’s project.  Paul is so clearly passionate about the positive effects of domiciliary dance and it is fantastic to see how he has used his research to bring so much joy to our clients.  His project started during lockdown but will only go on to get bigger and better as we grow and we wish him all the best in the competition.”

Paul said: “I am just thrilled to have been recognised for something that I just love doing.  Dancing can bring so much joy and stress relief in times of pain and pressure. It has so many physical, emotional and health-related benefits including bringing people together and helping people feel less isolated and lonely.  We dance and we laugh and everyone feels instantly better.”

Paul will return to Edge Hill University this academic year to study for a postgraduate MSc in Adult Nursing.  He is planning to do more work around the health benefits of dance and one day hopes to create a much wider project focussed on using dance to improve the health and wellbeing of many more people across the UK.

Established in 2017, Alcedo Care has fast gained an enviable reputation as the home care provider of choice thanks to its superb 700-strong team of highly skilled and compassionate carers who make a tangible difference to the quality of life of the company’s home care clients.

Run by Andy and Jo Boardman, a passionate husband and wife team, the company aims to bring something different to the sector based on recruiting only the very best carers and retaining them by placing value on job satisfaction, training, continued professional development, internal promotion prospects and pay structure.  This combined with using the very latest technology is what sets the Alcedo Care Group apart from other home care providers.

With offices across the whole of the North West region, Alcedo was recently rated joint best in the UK by online home care review website homecare.co.uk.  For further information on the range of home care services provided by Alcedo Care, or to discuss home care for yourself or a loved one, please visit www.alcedocare.co.uk.