SUMMERHILL Care Home has become the first official veteran friendly care home in Kendal.
The care home was awarded this title by the Veteran Friendly Framework, a project led by the Royal British Legion, Royal Star & Garter and the Veterans Covenant Healthcare Alliance.
Rebecca Whitehead, who is the manager of Summerhill, got in touch with the project and worked with Sean Moore, the wellbeing lead for HC-One (the group that own the care home), to make the home veteran friendly.
Mr Moore said: "The aim is to improve people's understanding of veterans and some of the things they've been through, especially when we've got residents who are living with dementia.
"Quite often they are living in that era in their heads.
"It was to try and educate the staff and put things into place to give us a better understanding of veterans and better ways we could interact with them."
Veterans who served with the armed forces are not the only focus, with new guidelines for the spouses of veterans, or the children of veterans.
The new status for the care home has opened up opportunities to work closer with armed forces groups in the area and to get involved with veteran coffee mornings and other activities.
Mr Moore said: "Now we've got the full schedule of all the meet ups in Kendal.
"We have a Wetherspoons which is just around the corner from the home - they have a meet up every couple of weeks that now the activities team have signed up to attend.
"That was something that was on our doorstep and we didn't even know about it."
The advice from the VFF has helped the care home to identify things that might trigger bad memories for veterans.
Mr Moore said: "People often say about people having good days and bad days, but when people are living with dementia it's more like a good ten minutes, a bad 20 minutes, a great 15 minutes and so on.
"This has helped us identify what things might be triggering people.
"There's a gentleman that I'm thinking of specifically who lost one of his best friends and there's a certain song that makes him recall losing his best friend.
"We can make sure that we avoid playing that song when were doing a big group sing along.
"It stops us from accidentally triggering sad memories of people, but it also helps us elevate the good and happy memories."
It will be a continuous process to maintain the veteran friendly status, with check ins with a VFF representative every couple of weeks.
The care home staff believe that the home has been elevated with the new status and have been contacted by many armed forces groups already.
They have even been contacted about a visit from somebody from the Ministry of Defence.
"It's massive for us," said Mr Moore.
"I think a lot of the staff here would quite openly admit that we didn't have a huge understanding of it initially.
"It's one thing to do all the hard work and get the veteran friendly status, but it's nothing if we don't keep it going.
"It wasn't so much about doing new stuff, but more adapting what we were already doing."
Share