What Can You Expect From a Great Care Home?

• Safety Measures: Comprehensive safety protocols, including staff training, building security, maintenance, and incident reporting, ensure residents feel secure.
• Homely Environment: Creating a homely atmosphere involves providing comfort, privacy, personalized amenities, and encouraging residents to bring in personal items.
• Personalized Care: Tailoring care plans to individual needs, with communicative and supportive staff, fosters a sense of understanding and compassion.
• Effective Management: Transparent leadership and effective communication among staff ensure residents’ happiness, safety, and comfort are prioritized.
• Thoughtful Design: Simple layouts, ample outdoor space, and intuitive features contribute to residents’ ease of navigation and well-being.
• Continuous Improvement: A commitment to ongoing improvement ensures that the care home evolves to meet the changing needs of its residents and staff.

Choosing a care home can be a significant decision for many, and it should be expected that the care home you do choose provides the highest standards of care possible.

But what goes into making a great care home? In this article, we’re taking a look at exactly that.

What is safety important in a care home

Care home safety comes in many forms, from the training, professionalism and support offered by staff to the security of the building, maintenance of appliances, general hygiene and more.

Residents should feel comfortable and safe throughout their stay, and confident that their needs are attentively looked after by a team who listen, learn and protect them from harm.

An essential safety process of any care home should be rigorous incident reporting.

Accidents and near misses can provide vital information regarding how to make improvements to management processes and physical features of the building itself, so this should be taken very seriously.

How to make a care home feel homely?

The more a care home feels like a true home to residents, the more effective it can be.

This should be sewn into the fabric of the building so residents can enjoy a level of freedom and independence from the very beginning. This includes aspects such as comfort, privacy, amenities, furnishing and the attitude and intuitive skill of the staff. 

One way you can make a care home feel truly like home is by encouraging residents to bring in items that remind them of friends and family.

This way, you can create a bridge between their old home and their current one.

Caring

From the beginning, a care home should cater to the personal needs of each resident.

Carers should be communicative and supportive every step of the way.

This is especially important during trying circumstances where residents, family and friends require the understanding of staff who can also provide the necessary skills and knowledge to maintain complete care at all times.

Signs of a well managed care home

You should always know who is in charge so you know where you can turn if you need to.

Managers, officials and staff will communicate concerns or ideas for improvement to each other, and keep the happiness, safety, health and comfort of all residents at the heart of everything they do.

You can have the best facilities in the world, but if those facilities are being poorly managed, residents will suffer as a result.

Care home design

A truly great care home starts with a well-thought-out design.

For example, a simple layout is desirable to ensure that residents can easily navigate around the building.

If there are too many winding hallways, this could lead to confusion and distress.

Another feature that should be baked into the design of a care home is plenty of outdoor space.

Exercise and fresh air is an absolutely essential contributing factor to the health and wellbeing of care home residents, so an outdoor area with plants, benches and simple walkways is encouraged.

Aedifice Partnership is a leading consultancy and project management firm specializing in delivering high-quality projects across various sectors, including care homes, residential properties, education establishments, and commercial properties.

Our range of services includes project management, chartered building surveys, CDM and quantity surveying among others.

At Aedifice Partnership, we have experience managing many successful care home builds, including the appointment of the right designers for care home construction and maintaining the relationships which come with such projects.

For further details on the services Aedifice Partnership offer, get in touch with our helpful team online or call 0800 151 0234.