Fostering as a blue light worker

When you are a blue light worker working in one of many emergency services, you probably spend your days taking care of others in need. This is why blue light workers make such amazing foster carers.

We understand that working as a blue light worker requires flexibility and unsociable hours, however it doesn’t discount you from becoming a foster carer. As long as you can provide a safe and stable environment for foster children, you are eligible to become a foster carer.

How can your current skills and experience help?

Whether you’re a policeman, a nurse or a firefighter, you will have gained skills in your career that will perfectly transfer into foster care. Two of the key requirements of being a foster carer are patience and empathy, something that blue light workers have in abundance.

Being able to connect with vulnerable people, people in crisis and people with heightened emotions is an invaluable skill to have.

Many of our foster children come from difficult backgrounds and they will need someone who can make them feel safe and at home in their new foster placement.

We have found that blue light workers are fantastic at dealing with particularly vulnerable children or children who need specialist care and attention. This is why we highly encourage workers in the emergency services to become foster carers.

Why are advanced specialist needs so sought after?

Many foster agencies will snap up the opportunity to welcome more blue-light workers to their foster care community. People already working in these specialist careers already have a lot of the skills and experience we look for in the perfect foster carer.

Although we welcome carers at any skill level, having carers at hand who can provide expert care is always helpful. These carers can be a lifeline for children that can’t be placed with carers with limited experience. We want to be able to offer the perfect home to all of our children equally, which means we also need a variety of different people with different experience levels and specialist skill sets.

What to consider when you’re fostering as a blue light worker

As we mentioned earlier, we fully understand that being a blue light worker also means unsociable or very long hours. All we ask is that you are able to provide adequate care when you’re at work either through a partner or a trusted family member.

We also know how hard it can be to work in the emergency services and so we strongly encourage our blue light carers to make sure they have a strong support network around them. This not only helps our carers to manage the extra responsibility of fostering but also ensures that the foster home maintains a positive and reinforcing environment for our foster children.

If you are a blue light worker and think you have the skills to be a foster carer, get in touch with us below.