Red Cross Blogs

My special days of the week – Part 2

By Miana Badd
July 31, 2009 at 3:55 pm

Tuesdays, Wednesday and Fridays

We support service users who have been referred to us by different organisations who we work in partnership with. There are, amongst other: the Scottish Refugee Council, the National Health Service, the Medical Foundation, Compass Team and the Tara Group. There are also so many service users who come in our drop-in or self refer.

Sometimes the place is very busy and I feel the rush. And the only dream I have is to go back home and relax in front of the telly, watch my favourite soaps.

And I also get a chance to whisper to myself: Oh what a day!

One of my roles at the Refugee Unit is to coordinate other volunteers.

The service users are assessed individually. Then they are paired with a volunteer according to gender and other criteria. If they need an interpreter then I pair them with a volunteer who speaks the same language from their country of origin. And those who speak fluent or good English are paired with any volunteer.

The volunteers do the general assessment and get all the information we need to help the service user. When service users come in, they do not give everything out on that day. They are traumatised, depressed and scared. But we gain their trust as we create a good working relationship.

A volunteer can take a service user for an outing around Glasgow to visit some places, show her/him some drop-ins like Red Cross Monday club, Scottish Refugee Council women’s group, Maryhill Integration network and other relaxing drop-ins depending in which area the service user stays, how to get around Glasgow using maps, buses, register with their local General Practitioners.

All these are arranged on different specific availability days of the volunteers.

This helps service users and these are some of our tricks to get to know the client and gain their trust on their first days in Glasgow.

On their second or third appointment, the service user is then able to tell us something painful about themselves, which they did not tell us on the first appointment. Things like being raped, tortured, suffering from a disease, or any other mental health they are suffering from. It is important that they can tell us so that we can help them.

Volunteers do work in the office and sometimes they do field work for the service users. Sometimes we have to pick service users from the YMCA. This where they are temporary housed when they claim Asylum. We bring them to either the office for the first assessment or they need escorting to a specific important appointment (especially when client is sickly and very depressed). We assist service users to attend first lawyer’s appointment or on their first interview at Home Office.

I always do the escort and transport for the service users because I am trained in Providing Emotional support and First Aid. Our service users need all the support we can offer because they are faintly weak. Some of them are just still getting used to the weather and don’t eat properly.  Everything depends on their needs.

Image by Sarah Zadik

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Tags: CAR, care, disease, First aid, Glasgow, rape, red cross, team, trauma, UK, UN, volunteer, volunteers

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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