Meet Edit Petruti, our activities assistant

Edit Petruti is one half of the dynamic activities team here at Parkfield, working alongside Caroline O’Connor who heads up the team.

Having joined the home as a care assistant shortly before the pandemic, she worked her way up to be a senior care assistant/medicine technician before moving over to the activities team in September 2022.

Romanian-born Edit grew up with her older brother in a small town called Deta in Timiș, the largest and most western county in Romania. Both her parents did professional building work, house maintenance and decoration. Unfortunately, Edit’s father developed early-onset rheumatoid arthritis and needed care for the rest of his life.

Edit was very young at the time, but this ignited an interest in caring for others. While in her teens and still at school, she started looking after elderly relatives (sometimes as a live-in carer) until they died, one by one.

While a live-in carer for one of her relatives, Edit met her husband Nicholas aged 17 at a disco. She asked her to dance, they married at 18 and by the time Edit was 19, their son Joseph had been born. Her daughter Andreea soon followed but, unfortunately, Nicholas fell ill, and Edit looked after him for four years until he died.

Several years later Edit met and married second husband Dan. The couple decided to make a major life change, following Andreea to the UK in 2016. They settled initially in Bournemouth, where Edit worked in a hotel and began to learn English. Two years later, the family moved to London where Edit enrolled at London University to study for a degree in health and social care. By the time she started working at Parkfield a year later, Edit was studying three days a week and working for another three, with just one day’s rest per week! It was extremely tiring, but Edit enjoyed her time at university, graduating in 2021.

Edit loves her role here at Parkfield. “I really enjoy organising and doing activities with the residents, being there to help them and making them happy. As far as I’m concerned, they are family and it’s a pleasure to take care of them. I always feel so content at the end of the shift when they thank me and say that they’ve had a lovely day. That’s my reward.”

She helps the carers out, too, whenever she can. “It’s for the residents, after all,” she says.

Away from work, Edit enjoys spending time with her husband Dan, a former facilities technician here at Parkfield, as well as with Andreea, an IT project manager, and son Joseph who runs his own furniture business. She knits a lot, too, creating everything from hats and headbands to sweaters and dresses. For her, knitting is “a real passion”, and a wonderful antidote to work. She also reads, watches a lot of world history and dreams of visiting Egypt one day.