End of an era in Help at Home

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye in September to John Hughes after 20 years of loyal service to Age UK Shropshire Telford & Wrekin and Help at Home in particular.

Starting out as a Home Support Worker, John quickly demonstrated his leadership qualities and became one of coordinators of the service in 2005 where he has remained ever since. In that time he has helped to grow the service to the scale it’s at today and in so doing has built up a huge collection of stories and anecdotes about the characters he’s had the pleasure (mostly!) of dealing with. We really hope he writes a book in his spare time!

Everyone who has ever had the privilege of working with John says the same things about him: the nicest, most supportive colleague you can imagine and someone who always has the best interests of his clients at the centre of all he does. Providing a quality service runs through him like a stick of rock.

Most recently, John ran our Winter Support service and since March has been providing much-needed support to the Telford end of the service, as well as demonstrating his manual skills helping to put up shelves, bookcases and notice boards in our new offices at Bellstone.

We’ve tried everything to make him reconsider retirement but his mind is made up. He’ll keep himself busy as he always does, largely as a distraction from his football team of choice from the red half of Manchester!

We will miss John immensely. He can’t be replaced, you simply cannot fill boots as big as his, but the new team will continue what he started, safe in the knowledge that John helped lay the foundations of this brilliant service.