In our latest story of Independent Lives, we spoke to Neeraj.
Neeraj lives in Southampton with his family and has been a PA since 2019.
While working in America as a dentist, Neeraj met his wife, and had planned to live with her in America once they had married, but when he met her family, everything changed.
She was a sole carer for her parents and her brother, who, at the time was struggling with mental health issues and alcohol addiction. Neeraj says that his wife ‘did not even know what a carer was’ and she just took her of her family because she loved them. Moving to America with his wife would have a huge impact on her family, so he moved to England to help them.
Neeraj learned how to be a carer ‘from scratch’ and said that it took a very long time for him to get support for his in-laws, partly because of a language barrier (his mother and father-in-law do not speak English) and because of how long the system took to recognise that his brother needed help. Neeraj recalls: “No one told us what a Direct Payment was, so we had to struggle a lot to get one”.
Outside of caring for his family members, Neeraj is also a PA for other people in Southampton and thoroughly enjoys his job: “It is amazing to be able to support people who need it and to help give them the independence to live their lives the way they want to”.
To support his work as a PA, Neeraj has used Independent Lives’ training courses to ensure his skills and knowledge are up to date and enrols on them whenever he can. “I found out about Independent Lives through one of my clients who uses your services and when I found out you offered training courses, I took them straight away and have found them incredibly helpful, particularly mental capacity”.
Now, after supporting him for eight years, Neeraj’s brother-in-law has turned his life around: “A few days ago he was telling his mum that he’s enjoying his life so much more now. Just today we did two activities, we went to the gym, and we did yoga. That kind of thing would have been unthinkable when we started on Direct Payments. He is living a very good life”
Having Direct Payments for his in-laws has also had a positive impact on his life as well: “There’s less stress in our family. My in-laws were always worried about what would happen to my brother-in-law when they weren’t around anymore, and how things would work. So now that everything is in place, that gives them real peace of mind”.
Independent Lives provides a range of training courses for Direct Payment recipients and personal assistants. To find out more, visit our training courses page on PA Pages.