Blog

Guests expect high standards when visiting respected hotels, standards that should undoubtedly be replicated in the care home environment.

Comfort and cleanliness are the most important factors when providing guests with a ‘home away from home’ feel – a crucial experience for both care homes and hotels to deliver. In fact, from the moment people enter a care home, it’s important to make a positive first impression. Guests expect to be greeted with a homely, clean and friendly environment, while their friends and families need to be assured their loved ones are in safe hands – your cleaning practices will be a key indicator of this.

A dance aerobics class has seen elderly Teesside residents making the most of the sunshine in their care home garden. Residents at Ingleby Care Home, in Ingleby Barwick, are benefitting from the fitness and wellbeing sessions following a Lottery grant last year.

They are being run by Billingham-based social enterprise Nouveau Wellbeing, who won the grant to engage with more than 600 people over the age of 60. The firm’s specialist practitioners have been visiting the care home to put the residents through their paces. 

Emma Bryan, a member of the dance aerobics Nouveau Tees Valley Team, decided to run the latest session in the care home garden to take advantage of the spell of good weather.

Alex Dawson is one of many residents at Waverley Lodge Care Home, in Lemington, to add his name to the home’s wish list.

The staff are aiming to fulfil as many wishes as possible, with the latest being Alex’s trip to the coastal town.

He traveled on the bus to Newcastle and then the Metro to Cullercoats with the home’s activities coordinator, Michelle Park.

The pair talked about the pubs that used to line Scotswood Road and stopped for a chat with soldiers holding a meet and greet in Newcastle town centre. Alex spoke of his time in the Army doing his national service.

He was then treated to a fish and chip supper on the seafront, after taking a tour of the town.

Reports suggest that the nursing shortage is the worst it’s been since records began, figures from NHS Improvement highlight that the NHS in England is short of 100,000 staff one in 11 of the entire workforce enter the Be Brilliant initiative.

The nursing shortage, combined with fears that nursing is an increasingly stressful and undervalued job can put people off becoming nurses; however, the University of Northampton is trying to change that.

One of the ways they are doing this is by providing a highly supportive training environment for their students on its adult nursing course that fully prepares them for the role.

Care homes in the UK accommodate people from across a full spectrum of society e.g. blended families and there will likely be a vast array of familial backgrounds in any given residence. One particular scenario we are seeing increasingly often is the emerging trend of residents who have blended families - where two or more families are brought together through marriage. This might be the residents themselves, who have married multiple times and as a result have various children, step-children, grandchildren and step-grandchildren. The term also applies to residents who have only ever married once themselves, but their children have undergone multiple marriages.

Dementia awareness champions at Abbotswood Court in Romsey have been hosting free dementia information sessions for members of the local community.

Abbotswood Court, a luxury care home and retirement development, is encouraging others to make a positive difference to the lives of those living with dementia in Romsey. Open to the public, they host regular sessions which give attendees information about the personal impact of dementia, and what they can do to help. Currently, there are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise to over 1 million by 2025.

Late January 2018, sitting in a bus station, I got chatting to an elderly woman, a widow, she travelled out twice a week to play bingo with her friends and when my bus arrived, apologised for speaking to me, surprised I told her not to be silly, but this indeed got me thinking about The Talk Scheme.

How about instead of letting the art of conversation die away, we bring it back? And bring it back we shall.

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The majority of independent healthcare professionals (85%) are concerned that ongoing staff shortages will cause a decline in NHS patient safety, a survey has found. 

The research by the Independent Health Professionals' Association (IHPA), questioned 537 independent healthcare staff on a range of issues affecting their working lives.
When asked what they felt is putting the biggest strain on care provision in the NHS, staff shortages topped the list. 

A further 64% of respondents believe that funding cuts are responsible, with 54% stating that management, internal bureaucracy and wastage is to blame. Over one in five (21%) believe that a decline in patient care standards is being driven by the number of patients using the service without genuine need. 

A pensioner who enjoyed her first ever foreign trip has been able to share her holiday photos with the boss of the charity who developed the innovative new care support system, CleverCogs, that allowed her to travel to Vietnam.

Margaret Sancken, 65, felt confident enough to book her first ever holiday to Vietnam thanks to Blackwood’s CleverCogs system, a digitally enhanced product which aims to keep people as independent as possible. Blackwood has a commitment to push the boundaries of technology to allow property adaptations which make a huge difference to people with disabilities.