The Beacon Centre – Adapting Services/Support in Response to Coronavirus
The Beacon Centre are delivering Specialist Employment Support for visually impaired clients as part of 3SC’s supply chain across the UK. Covid-19 has presented significant challenges around the delivery of these programmes but The Beacon Centre have made many changes and adaptations to ensure that they can deliver the support their clients need. This means that all clients are helped to develop, progress, and most importantly, are receiving support to help ensure their mental health remains positive.
Beacon’s Employment Team are working from home and as no face to face contact is allowed with our clients, they have made adaptations to how they provide support which includes:
- Daily welfare calls providing help with online registration, ordering and management of the delivery of essential supplies.
- Help, advice and support on how to follow social distancing regulations, healthy eating, exercise and mental health support.
- Extensive use of online services to continue to provide employability support, interview practice and technical assistance.
- IT support and fortnightly newsletter sent out to clients detailing; software changes, new features, apps and websites with detailed instructions on how to use them.
- Community and third-party referrals including mental health support, GPs and social services.
- Help with food bank referrals.
Much of the support provided is holistic and goes beyond the purely employability-based provision. One of their clients was worried about the provision of food for his dog and this affected his mental health so through our work we arranged to ensure this support was provided.
To find out more about our contracts and work, please visit www.3sc.org
Paul Johnson, Contract Performance Manager, 3SC