An EU care worker's story: 'I want to make a difference in people's lives'
Veronica Vorobet learned about caring for people in her home country of Romania by nursing her grandmother and grandfather in the final months of their lives. In 2013, after their deaths, she decided to turn it into a career and moved to England to find a job, using the freedom provided by EU membership.
Vorobet, 36, is one of a quarter of a million care workers who are not UK nationals, a rising proportion of whom have come from the EU in recent years as employers have found it harder to secur visas to recruit from further afield. They have become an essential part of a low-paid workforce in a sector that is chronically understaffed, with about 120,000 vacancies.
Related: Brexit: UK's new fast-track immigration system to exclude care workers
On Monday she expressed disappointment with the government announcement that there would be no special treatment for carers coming into the UK from abroad after Brexit. Vorobet said making it harder to recruit from the EU would reduce the stability of care staffing – an important part of providing long-term care – and risk shortages of carers.
“I want to see people treated the way I want to be treated and to make a difference in people’s lives, making a feeling of home for everyone,” she told the Guardian. “The foreign workers are important in this. They are able to work under a lot of stress and long hours. In my country we are very close to our elderly people and that is what we show here. We try to be close to them and respect their wishes.”
She said her approach was to treat residents as if they were her own grandparents and provide similar levels of “support and affection”.
When she arrived in the UK, Vorobet started at the bottom of the profession as a junior care worker on the minimum wage in a home for older people in Petersfield, Hampshire. Seven years on and having studied for an NVQ in health and social care, she is a deputy care manager in St Anthony’s residential care home in Watford, part of RMD Care. There she works alongside other Romanian people, as well as carers from India, Sri Lanka and Kenya, whose job it is to look after 21 people.
Her most recent trial has been keeping coronavirus out of the home, which has been successful so far. She said that given the difficulty of recruiting care workers, European workers had helped create stability in the workforce. Staff turnover rates in adult social care currently stand at about 30% a year.
“The government should do their research and find out who does these jobs and understand the risk of taking this decision,” she said. “That risk is there won’t be enough staff to look after the people in need.”
