A Care Home that’s Part of the Dorchester Community
One of the things we are most proud of at Glencairn House is our lively and welcoming atmosphere. We create a Home-from-Home for our residents, and as well as creating a Home that’s comforting, light and airy, this also means that we work to ensure our residents continue to have full and sociable lives.
Being part of the local community has been a big part of many of our residents’ lives and we don’t think this should come to an end when they move to our Home. That’s why we are not just a Care Home in Dorchester but a Care Home that is part of Dorchester life.
Over the past year we have started two activities that have really helped to cement our links with both the younger and older generations in our Dorchester community – our Buddy Scheme with Sunninghill Prep School and our Bi-monthly Community Knit and Natter Sessions.
Our Buddy scheme with Sunninghill Prep School started earlier this year and has been a great success. For six weeks starting in January we had some lovely Year 4 visitors who became buddies with our residents. The children and their buddies chatted, played games and cooked biscuits. The children also wrote biographies, performed their LAMDA pieces and even played a mini musical concert.
It was wonderful to see the relationships flourish between the generations. As one of the children said: “We laugh and have fun and talk to each other. I have the best buddy ever!’”
Following on from our Buddy visits we were also invited to the school to see their wonderful performance of ‘’Moana’’. In June we were also invited to the school’s ‘Grandparents Day’ as honorary grandparents and our residents were treated to a cream tea, while their Buddies showed them their school work, and then we watched a wonderful choral and musical performance. Our Grandparents’ Day even made the Dorset Echo! We look forward to seeing our Buddies again in September.
As well as our Buddy scheme we also started our Dorchester Knit and Natter Sessions in June. These are completely free Community sessions, open to all and have been an enormous success so far. We are even starting to think about how we can create more room to accommodate all our new Knit and Natter friends!
It has been a real breath of fresh air for our residents to meet new people through these sessions and, inspired by their success, we hope to be able to hold more Community events at our Dorchester Care Home over the coming year.
