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 the Envision phase in Being appreciative. Being appreciative is a positive and motivating approach to developing practice and enhancing participation. It pays attention to the best in us, not the worst; to our strengths, not our weaknesses; to possibility thinking, not problem thinking.

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

As one care home shared …

It’s been some months now since the restrictions were lifted, although it’s still very difficult for us in the care home sector, because it feels like not much has changed! We’ve heard a number of people describe wonderful things that they undertook during the restrictions. We also engaged in a variety of initiatives. Some of these were completely novel and exciting. Others were adaptations to the way we went about some of our regular activities. What continues to spring to mind is how we could make these wonderful things sustainable. We just don’t want them to be one-offs. We don’t want things which had such a positive impact on residents, relatives and staff, to simply not continue. It’s got us thinking.

 

We’ve been reviewing almost everything we did during the restrictions and thinking of how to embed some of these into our regular functions. Although, we certainly don’t want it to feel like additional work. So far, we’ve made some useful progress on ‘little’ things as well as quite significant areas of how we operate. For instance, you often hear of the ‘little things that matter’, and how this can make your day. Well, we’ve been working on creating an atmosphere which facilitates more of these ‘little’, ‘ordinary’ things. On of such initiatives is to have what we call Me Moments. For this, we work with our residents one at a time, to find out about one thing they would really like to do in that period. We then work towards organising it, ensuring that staff time is properly covered, without colleagues having to do additional work. This can take some time and resource, but we have kept up with it as we consider it a way to make sure beautiful moments can happen more often.

How would your residents, relatives and staff really like things to be in the care home?