“In all the time I’ve done agency work, never once have I gone into a home and thought I’d want to work there permanently,” says Alison McMahon. That was until she came to ASC’s specialist care facility in Balbeggie.

“The team welcomes everyone from Day One,” says Alison, a Staff Nurse at ASC. “It was never that I was agency to them [and not part of the team]. They just included me. There literally is no ‘i’ in this team.”

A long-time nurse, she spent a number of years in the NHS. When she left, she worked in Elderly Mentally and Infirm (EMI) units and with people with learning disabilities and behavioural issues. She came to ASC for what was initially intended to be a three-month stint and “fell in love with the place”.

It’s something you hear a lot from the staff at ASC,  which supports adults with a diagnosed learning disability and associated mental health conditions. Once they have the ASC ‘bug’ they’re committed, bonding with the team and the service users.

But for Alison there was another reason to feel that, in her own words, “this was home”. Alison’s adult son has autistic tendencies, which wasn’t diagnosed until he was midway through high school. Seeing how the support staff at ASC deal with service users – many of whom have autism – has had a direct impact on Alison’s home life, for the better.

“Just in the way I’m interacting with him now, there were things I had never thought of trying with him. I’m finding I now deal with it better. Working at ASC has helped me as a parent,” she says.

Want to join Alison and the ASC team? View our vacancies here.