The Caregivers
The primary role of the Caregivers is to reach out to the community in the 50 square kilometre area surrounding The Holy Cross Hospice and provide care and support to the most needy on a structured and consistent basis. During the year ended December 2009, the Caregivers made over 5,500 visits to individual households in this community.
The activities carried out by the Caregivers when they are specifically providing support to the orphans and child headed families are as follows:
- Weekly visits to the homes of the children where there are orphans or vulnerable children in which the children are either being fostered by a member of the community or where there is a child headed family.
- Distribution of food parcels each month.
- Arranging for houses to be built for the child headed families whose parents have died and left them without any shelter or placing, where possible, orphans with foster homes in their community.
- Supplying children with clothing, blankets and any basic needs.
- Attending to the medical needs of the children; this can encompass the distribution of medication, referrals to doctors, clinics or hospitals or, in the extreme cases to the hospice.
- Counselling those children that are HIV positive.
- Counselling the children who have, or are about to lose their parents.
- Providing advice and counsel on the dangers of AIDS.
- Preparing “memory boxes” for each orphan and child headed family, thereby keeping mementos and family documents in safe keeping; the former to maintain a link to their family and the latter being critical to ultimately provide proof that they are orphans and hopefully qualify for State support.
- Helping orphaned children get their birth certificates and the death certificates of their parents; this is necessary to enable children to apply for State grants. The Caregivers arrange for the orphaned children to be screened and referred to Department of Social Welfare so that they can obtain the grants.
- Ensuring that the children who are the head of the families go to school and remain there; some older children refuse to go back to school as they feel that they are “adults” having played the adult role for so long.
- Writing letters to school headmasters to have them admit the orphans in to their schools; not all orphans are accepted for free as schools have budgetary constraints and are invariably reluctant or unable to accommodate non-fee paying children.
- Supplying, where possible, the orphans with uniforms and stationery and paying their school fees or negotiating with the authorities to have the fees waived.
- Identifying children that are at risk of losing their parents, foster parents or child head of the family; mostly through sickness in order to ensure that care can be put in place when the need arrives.
In essence, the Caregivers are “surrogate parents” for these children.
Sister Pricilla has trained over 150 Caregivers over the last few years and, until the end of 2002, they received no pay. As a consequence, only a small number were able to afford to work in the Home Based Care Programme and those that did, could only do so for a few days a week. To truly give these children a start in life, the number of Caregivers and days worked had to increase.
In February 2003, the Trust began to provide the Caregivers with a monthly allowance of R650 (£50). This has resulted in each Caregiver being able to work full time, dramatically improving the emotional and physical state of the children. At that time, there were 13 part-time Caregivers; there are currently 23 full-time Caregivers that receive an allowance from the Trust. Significantly, the Caregivers now reach out to 2,500 orphans in comparison with 600 in 2002.
The Caregivers receive training from Sister Priscilla and from outside agencies covering many aspects such as primary health care, AIDS treatment, child and bereavement counselling, personal growth, rape crisis, yoga, palliative care, AIDS awareness and prevention and Natural Family Planning.
The performance of the Caregivers and progress of each orphan and child headed family is monitored carefully. Caregivers meet every Monday at the Holy Cross Hospice to receive on-going training, share experiences and provide their written reports and statistics. Statistics are maintained for each visit, for each child and for each child headed family and are used to help provide targeted and effective care. These statistics are also provided to Regional Hospice Care Associations, The Global Fund, State institutions and to the Trust. During the year ended December 2008, the Caregivers made some 5,500 household visits. The Home Based Care Programme remains one of the biggest projects of its kind in KwaZulu-Natal.
This year, the Trust initiated a database project together with Xchanging PLC, a UK listed company. The aim is to help Sister and her team streamline her back office operations and are in the process of devising a reporting system that will be used to help her more effectively target the home based care programmes and compile statistics for external health care bodies.
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