Putting care at the heart of our communities

“Our residents do not live in our work place, we work in their home.”

I have been sharing this quote from a care home worker and thinking about it a lot over the last few weeks.

I feel very honoured as part of our ‘You Can Make a Difference’ Campaign and tour across the country to spend most days speaking to staff in hospitals, hospices and care homes, or our next generation of healthcare professionals in colleges or universities.

So often I travel home feeling inspired by the people that I’ve met and pledges that we’ve received.

The quote made me reflect on the way that residential care is often thought about, both in terms of the people who live there and the staff who work there.

Communities are in our hearts, we are the heart of our communities and our homes are at the heart of our community and relationships. This isn’t something that should change when we start live in a care home, after all, as the quote points out – this is our home now.

If we want to create friendly and supportive communities we have to include care homes, the people who live and the people who work there.
If we are going to ask people ‘what and who matters to you?’, let’s make sure we ask the people living and working in care homes too.

What can you and I do to help change perceptions, and make sure that people living in residential care remain at the heart of our communities?

For my part, a big focus of my work through the Dementia Carer Voices project has been about highlighting the unique life stories of people living with dementia and their carers, and celebrating the role of the staff that make a real difference to their lives.

“Our residents don’t live in our work place, we work in their home”. In fact, our residents don’t just live in our care homes, they live in our communities and we can all play a part in supporting them to live well and stay included.

Tommy Whitelaw
Dementia Carer Voices Project Engagement Lead
The ALLIANCE

Tommy 

Campaign Update

Dementia Carer Voices has engaged with over 60,000 people in person over the last 2 years at over 500  talks and event. Collecting 12,000 pledges from health and social care professionals and we’d like to share some of their inspiring words, and help celebrate the work they do to putting pledges in to practice make a difference.

We are very inspired by the different ways individuals, hospitals, universities, care homes and care at home teams have been putting pledges in to practice. 

Read our case studies of how hospitals, universities and care homes are putting people at the heart of their work at:

https://dementiacarervoices.wordpress.com/case-studies/

 You can read every pledge here at: https://dementiacarervoices.wordpress.com/pledges/