My introduction to working in Care was a small, family run business, based in Gloucester and it employed around 100 staff. After six quite happy years in that company I was dismayed when it was sold in 2019 to Voyage Care. I spent the next two and a half years working for what is a large, amorphous, corporate business, claiming to be a “Care Company” when, in reality, it’s an organisation that’s concerned only with money and trying to maintain its own image and reputation. The managers, even at the most junior grade, are so detached from the actual delivery of care that they know next to nothing about the service users they make money from. Nor do they interact with, communicate positively with or show any appreciation for the staff who support the clients. With a heavy shortage of staff being the norm, I was frequently working 350 hours a month and never once did a manager express a word of thanks, either to myself or any fellow co-worker for the time, commitment and devotion to duty clearly demonstrated. But, something that’s been experienced and witnessed by many, is that if you make the slightest error, there are managers who will instantly pounce upon the issue and who seem to take a kind of spiteful, vindictive delight in having the opportunity to berate and humiliate that otherwise hard-working and diligent member of staff, regardless of how minor and trivial the wrong doing. When Voyage buys out a smaller company and, with the legal obligation it has to to do so, takes on the staff who were part of it, they do their upmost to make life as unpleasant and insufferable for those individuals. We had around 10 care settings, each with its own team leader, most of whom had happily worked in their respective roles for years. Within less than 12 months of Voyage taking over all but one of those team leaders had resigned in disgust at how they were treated under Voyage.I began my first full-time job in 1972; that’s 50 years ago. In that half-century I’ve worked for quite a few small businesses; I’ve also worked for some huge, blue chip companies like IBM, Microsoft, RBS and several well known insurance companies. In my honest opinion Voyage Care is the most disgraceful organisation I’ve ever had the misfortune to be in any way associated with. They treat the very staff they rely heavily upon with absolute contempt and are simply too large a company to work efficiently and effectively as a “care” company. They spend ridiculous sums of money trying to implement certain examples of ostensibly slick technology in a pathetic attempt to look like they know what they’re doing and then place the maintenance of that technology in the hands of office-based staff who are neither intelligent enough or sufficiently trained in that technology to have a clue about what they’re doing. The result is a shambolic mess, day after day, where support workers spend disproportionate amounts of time phoning office staff in desperate attempts to get basic office admin issues rectified. It’s a nightmare.Thought for the day:-DON’T WORK FOR VOYAGE CARE!!!!
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Voyage Care is a sector leading provider, with over 35 years’ experience of specialist care and support. We support over 3,500 people with learning disabilities, autism, brain injuries and other complex needs across the UK.
