Today's #carehomeweek17 theme is #friendship and Anderson's Care Home in Elgin benefits from enjoying numerous enduring friendships with organisations based in their community. Margaret Mackie's blog below provides more insight into the value of these relationships to residents at the care home.
In Anderson's, we believe that people in residential care should be able to enjoy a quality of life equalling, even surpassing what can be available to older people in their own homes. Individuality is important and actively promoted. Each person brings his/her own personality and unique life experience.
One of our residents who is well known in the community and especially to our local football club, continues to attend home matches so we invited the football players to join us for tea, fun and games. So lovely for our residents to meet the players, coaches and legends from Elgin City Football Club. We were also joined by VIP Childcare Moray with whom we have a wonderful intergenerational link. The youngsters visit us on a weekly basis and entertain us with singing, stories and cuddles. VIP Childcare have their own vegetable plot in our gardens and our residents love to watch them planting their vegetables and watching them grow. The horticultural students from Moray College UHI visit each week and attend to our gardens. This is something special for residents who were keen gardeners. They enjoy picking the fruit and vegetables at the end of summer. We have also welcomed their beauty therapy students who spend time pampering our residents who really enjoy the attention.
We were very fortunate to welcome “employee volunteering” Chivas volunteers to join us on a couple of occasions. The first visit, they painted our fences in the gardens with the residents providing the juice and sweeties during the day. Their second visit, the Chivas volunteers assisted carers to escort our residents to East end School, with whom we also enjoy fantastic intergenerational links to watch their nativity play.
We Love to celebrate special events in a big way, i.e. Easter, Halloween, Christmas, Queens birthday, Valentine’s Day, Robbie Burns Day etc. Our residents look forward to these special events and enjoy helping to make the decorations at the arts and crafts group each Friday. Once a year, we host a “Wig Wednesday” fun day. This is in aid of Clic Sargent supporting children with cancer. Residents really loved making their own hats and wigs and we were delighted to raise £333 for the charity.
Each Christmas we receive a special invitation to attend a Christmas dinner at our RAF base in Lossiemouth. Gordonstoun school also send out an invitation to us each Christmas to spend an afternoon with them and enjoy a lovely high tea and entertainment from the pupils. We are regularly attended by volunteers from the students and there has been a community link with the school for over 40 years.
One of the most revolutionary ways in which Anderson's communicates with our community is via our Facebook page which shows all the wonderful things our residents participate in and all the events which take place. By engaging in the medium of social media we have opened up a whole new world of communication for both our residents and relatives alike as social media has helped to bridge the gap in generational participation.
This is particularly lovely for families who live a distance away, especially those living abroad, who are able to respond and leave their own comments. Our Facebook page is very popular and we receive thousands of likes on some of our posts.
