My Home Life Community involvement in care homes (Online)

Community engagement is a key priority for care homes wishing to drive up their reputation, attract the next generation of potential employees into the care home sector, attract future customers, and most importantly, to help residents to connect with the people, places and things that really matter to them.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) have recently identified community engagement as a key characteristic of outstanding care homes. Establishing links with the community that aren’t face-to-face is even more vital given social distancing and the loneliness it can create.

If this is your ambition, let us help you get started!

Who is it for?

Senior team leaders/Activity coordinators / wellbeing coordinators/ community connectors.

Timetable

This online course consists of an introductory call, one individual coaching session and three virtual sessions of 2.5 hours each. The sessions take place once every three weeks.

Benefits

My Home Life England has over 14 years of experience working with care homes. We have developed a programme called ‘Care Home Friends and Neighbours’ to make it easy for care homes to support neighbourliness and friendships that help care home residents feel cherished and part of civic and community life.

This training helps you take forward your own ambitions for community engagement. You will be supported on your own journey to:

• Bring children and young people closer to your care home
• Enable community groups and clubs to interact with residents virtually
• Invite people from your neighbourhoods to see a resident, drop off some donated magazines, films, books, write letters, play music, etc
• Respond to the specific wishes of your residents - the big and little things that bring ‘light to life’.

We will cover all you need to know about getting started in community engagement. We will send you a box of materials that will accompany the course. During workshops you will be

• working with small groups of like-minded practitioners and get to share experiences of community engagement and gather ideas to put into practice.
• supported to consider what groundwork needs to be in place to help your care home feel welcoming and encouraging of outside individuals and organisations.
• Considering how best to get the most out of current community relationships
• Mapping your local community assets
• Developing skills and growing confidence in approaching people from communities to engage with you, for example new people, schools, businesses and clubs.

You will receive a certificate of learning from City, University of London’s My Home Life England Programme.

This course is provided by the School of Health & Psychological Sciences.

No prior experience is required.

English requirements

You will need a good level of spoken and written English to enrol on this course.