Welcome to CCCS Subscriber Support
This is the members-only portion of the Cork Community Chaplaincy Services (CCCS) web site.
Learn more about CCCS here.
Subscription membership to our CCCS wellness service is designed for people who are caregivers and/or helpers – people who personally provide a range of assistance to address the needs of their service users.
- Caregivers have roles involving providing care for another person who is a service user. Often the caregiver’s role focused on providing an essential service for the service user. A service user has a dependency on their caregiver and would loose some or all of their independence without them. As a result, caregivers often have formally defined responsibilities and accountability.
- Helpers are individuals who provide assistance to another person. The relationship between a service user and their helper may be less essential, more discretionary, and not so critical to the service users’ independence. As a result, helper roles may be less well defined and less formal than the caregiver‘s. A helper may be providing occasional or intermittent help to a service user.
Whether you are providing assistance in the form of “care for” or “help to” your service users, you are engaged in a relationship. That relationship may:
- be the main focus of your regular job
- be only an occational part of your regular job
- be a family responsibility
- be a volunteer activity
- involve one or more service users at a time
- involve the same or constantly changing service user(s)
- involve an ongoing or one time relationship
Whatever form your relationship with your service user(s) takes, it requires work. One kind of work is the operational task management work of the job itself. That is the set of specific tasks that you perform in order to provide the services associated with your role as a caregiver or helper. There is also different kind of work that focuses on your role in the relationship you have with the service user and how that role affects you personally. When service users encounter challenging or difficult situations, aspects of that emotional impact transfers through the relationship to their caregivers and helpers. By actively managing their service user relationship role, caregivers and helpers can be more effective and more personally satisfied with their work.
Assisting caregivers and helpers to address their role management needs is the goal of CCCS and why our focus is on:
caring for the caregiver
helping the helper
CCCS understands that the relationship aspects of providing care and help can be very demanding, even to the point of taking an emotional toll. That is why this wellness service is designed to help our CCCS subscribers build the skills and utilise the resources needed to become more interpersonally effective and emotionally resilient. Thereby making your caregiving and helping a more rewarding experience for both you and your service user(s).
You may be wondering why we are using what may seem to be a rather impersonal term – service user. One reason is that it is accurate is because both caregivers and helpers serve others and the people whom they serve are service users.
Another reason is that we are referring to a whole range of specific relationships. Service users may have more specific labels in different contextual situations. Here are some examples:
So, when you see the term service user used here, in your own mind, just substitute the contextually best fitting term that applies to your own particular caregiver or helper situation. For example:
- if you volunteer at an assisted living facility – think resident
- if you work as a nurse in a hospital – think patient
- if you care for a family member – think mother / brother / daughter / etc.
- If you volunteer at a community social service organisation – think client
- If you are part of a religious ministry – think parishioner or congregant
You may even find that your situation involves multiple different contexts. Look to apply what you are learning to your own individual situation.
Site Navigation - Finding Your Way Around
CCCS has designed this website to support you as you pursue on-going wellness. The navigation to the major portions of the website are:
CCCS will share articles related to basic caregiver/helper skills and self-care practices. You can read and comment on these articles. Every month we will feature one of these articles in our newsletter which will be E-Mailed to you.
CCCS has listed some of our more commonly used self-assessments. These are not intended to be psychological diagnostic tools. Rather, they are questioners which are intended to allow you to conduct thoughtful self-examination. Where scoring or normative data is available, CCCS give you the opportunity to discuss your results with us.
We all have different learning styles. For those who like a good presentation now and then, CCCS provides a weekly webinar. The details are announced in our monthly newsletter.
Whether you are looking to up-skill or re-skill, CCCS’ training can help you grow and provide quality services. CCCS provides both traditional classroom training and, for its wellness subscribers, CCCS provides on-line self-paced mini-courses. The monthly featured course will be announced in the newsletter.
Here is where you have the option to dig a little deeper. CCCS follows evidence-based approaches to chaplaincy. When we find current research that is relevant and not overly technical, we share it.
Here is your chance to optionally talk with other caregiver/helpers who provide similar services. Sessions are lead by experienced chaplaincy supervisors.