The COVID-19 Recovery and Rehabilitation project was kindly funded by The Rayne Foundation to help care homes share with each other what they are doing to help individuals living, dying, visiting and working in care homes for older people to move on from COVID-19. This story relates to Focusing on relationships. We all need to feel a sense of security, belonging, continuity, purpose, achievement and significance to be in good relationship with others. This story focuses mainly on the sense of purpose, but within it all the other senses are visible.

If you have a story to share, please email us on mhlcharity@outlook.com.

As one care home shared …

During the lockdown, we did our best to organise various activities for the home, whilst observing social distance and other guidelines [sense of security]. We had a number of such activities online. We tried to make things fun, but most of the activities did not compare to how things were pre-lockdown. For example, sitting close enough to people to have chit-chats, eating together, and having in-person connections. Despite this drawback, there were other benefits to the experience. The need to continue to make things happen for our residents gave us a challenge to rise to [sense of continuity] and being able to rise to the challenge has brought a kind of aspiration to take on difficult tasks [sense of purpose]. As a team, we feel that we have achieved great things under difficult circumstances, and we now have aspirations to set goals which could be considered quite challenging [sense of achievement]. From our experience during the lockdown, we feel that we worked well together [sense of belonging] in a way that we hadn’t done before and that we can do it again. In some ways it feels like we’ve been ‘cured’ of the trepidation of taking risks and the fear of failing.

 

One of the exciting things we’ve done was a sponsored walk in our garden for a charity fundraising. It was a 100km walk around the garden! The whole home got involved in this and we really enjoyed it, especially when it came to tallying the total distance covered. Well, we didn’t stop there. Based on this activity, we went on to create a fitness route around the garden, it’s quite a large garden. At specific points on the route, there are signposts which describe exercises to be done as you arrive at that point. For example, reach to the sky 10 times, take 5 deep breaths as you arrive at the waterfall, etc. We also encourage our staff team to share the exercise time with residents, to encourage time outside and boost well-being.

 

Another aspiration is for Christmas. Christmas celebration during lockdown was the biggest one we’ve had so far. We made such a big thing of it especially because of all the difficulty the lockdown had brought. All hands were on deck, and we pulled it off in grand style [sense of significance]. This has obviously set the bar higher for the next Christmas celebration, but you know what, we feel ready to take on the challenge. In fact, this is how we know that something indeed has changed about us. We talk about it as an achievable goal and we aren’t deterred by the enormous task that it will be, as we must collaborate with many more people this time round [sense of purpose]. We have some volunteers who are such wonderful support to our home, and although facilitating their work with us has been difficult in the past, we know we can rely on them. Now, we have a different outlook, and we look forward to working together to make things happen [sense of belonging].

How do you help others feel a sense of purpose and have goals to aspire to?