Our Partnership With Birchwood House
The offices for Birchwood Care Services are located at Birchwood House, a residential care home based on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells. We enjoy an excellent partnership with the care home, with some of our clients going into the home at one time or another either for some respite care or if they need to go into a care home permanently.
Having a care home we work so closely with offers many benefits to our clients which include:
Continuity of care
Whenever one of our clients goes into the care home, either for a short period or a longer period, having two teams who know each other so well and are used to communicating with each other can really help. It means that if one of our clients has a particular routine, quirk or challenge in their care, our teams can discuss this together so the client receives the same care they would in the care home as they would at home. Our team know the care home team well – we’re always invited to their Christmas parties and summer barbeques so we can work together as a big team if necessary.
We see this continuity of care as a major advantage over a homecare business who doesn’t have this partnership with a care home as the transition is made that much smoother.
Speed of respite care
Sometimes respite care is needed for one of our clients in an emergency. If this is the case, our Manager Wendy can liaise with Helen who runs the care home and we can usually get clients respite care very quickly in Birchwood House with the excellent continued level of care already mentioned (assuming they have space).
Clients can go home sooner from respite care
Clients who are in the care home for respite care can often want to leave and go back to their own home as soon as they can. If a client is in Birchwood House, we can usually get them home sooner than if they were in another care home for respite care because we can discuss with the Birchwood House team and offer them all the additional support they need.
Community for clients they wouldn’t otherwise get
There has been a lot of information in the press recently about loneliness in old age. As this information on the NHS website shows, there’s plenty that can be done to help, but it’s still something we’re very conscious about.
Our partnership with Birchwood House helps us give clients the opportunity to socialise more broadly with residents of the care home in the following ways:
- All our clients are invited to the Birchwood House Christmas Party and Summer Barbeque which gives them a great opportunity to meet and interact with other clients and residents in the care home
- We have started a lunch club for our clients where they can come and have lunch in the care home during the day and join in with the same activities the residents of the care home are participating in
Clients see familiar faces when they become residents!
This is quite a nice one for us – if a client moves into the care home, we can pop in and see them whenever we’re in the office. We love this as we build such close bonds with our clients that it’s lovely to be able to maintain contact with them even if we’re no longer caring for them.
Our clients enjoy this as well as it can seem much less daunting moving into a new care home if you have one of our team who they have been seeing regularly popping in every couple of days to say hi and see how they’re settling in!
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