My Home Life & Care England Series: Thrive Healthily

This is the final article in a 6-week collaboration with My Home Life England, spotlighting their extraordinary ‘Thriving in Residential Care’ research, giving a voice to older people, families and care teams about the ways care homes are transforming lives.

Join us for a webinar on 16th April 2025 to explore how all these ‘Thriving’ themes can be embedded into care services.

Our ‘Thriving in Residential Care’ study revealed that an important benefit of residential care was that older people could be supported to maintain or even improve their health. In all the care homes we visited, we heard powerful stories of how, with the right health support, lives were transformed for the better.

Care team member Caitlin spoke of a lady who arrived from hospital with a “grade five pressure sore”. She said, “She wasn’t eating. She wasn’t drinking. They expected her to be gone within weeks.” With the right support, she is now eating well and the pressure sore is healed; “She’s amazing, she’s thriving, she’s not going anywhere.” Similarly Gillian, who lived at a different home, was on oxygen when she arrived. The care team recognised that Gillian’s breathing became worse in winter, and that this was due to an infection that was causing her to need oxygen. The care team treated her with the right antibiotics and after that “she never used oxygen ever again and her life greatly improved”.

Manager Jay shared the story of a gentleman whose communication had improved dramatically in the eight years he lived in their care home. It had always been assumed by those around him that he had a learning disability, but instead the care team found that he was actually profoundly deaf. Jay remembered, “He was 82 and we started to teach him how to speak and say words properly. Now that for me breaks my heart and also, I love it, because no one has tried to do that with this gentleman for 82 years…and we were able to do that for somebody”.

One of the most important aspects of healthcare in care homes is having the right professional support to monitor, regulate, and distribute medication. For older people who lived alone, it can be easy to muddle the timing and doses of medications. Having support at medical appointments was also important, as some older people had previously struggled to attend when living alone as they had to rely upon others.

Care homes were shown to provide proactive and pre-emptive medical care, with “soft sign” monitoring and checking health markers. As Jay shared, “in a care home setting, you can be very proactive. You have a lot more time [than in domiciliary care] and you can pre-empt things, plan, be strategic.” Care homes also had timely and reliable access to other health professionals, than if living in the community. 88-year-old Pam was appreciative of the easier access to a doctor when necessary, stating “you wouldn’t get that if you were at home.” Families also appreciated being able to ask about changes they noticed in their relative. Jim remembered how, on one visit to his mother Pali, she was fast asleep for the whole morning and that had alarmed him, and he wondered if it was due to her dementia, lack of sleep, or something else. He was able to speak to the senior staff to reassure him.

Older people also valued having regular and good quality meals and drinks. 98-year-old Suzanne shared, “When I was at home… [and] feeling really bad… I had to get myself something to eat. It used to take me an hour and a half to get a cup of tea, and I lived for a fortnight on brown bread, Marmite and oranges, I was lacking good food.” Living in a care home had helped her to eat well again.

Finally, it was important to recognise that wellbeing extends through all stages of life and end of life is no exception. Many of the homes we visited were providing excellent end-of-life support and we spoke to some care team members who were genuinely passionate about this aspect of care. Manager Victoria was supporting people and their families to think about death and dying in advance. Her specially designed ‘Elephant in the Room’ sessions were unravelling the stigma around a topic which had been “taboo, quiet, restricted”, and people were engaging in the topic, expressing their wishes in advance, and even having “a good old laugh” in a supportive, caring environment.

The theme of this research is aptly summed up by manager Lynette, who told us; “we know that for a lot of the people living in care homes, this is their last chapter. This is it. So, we have to do everything we can to make it the best chapter that they have.” Throughout this extraordinary research we heard just that – countess stories of lives transformed by residential care. High quality, proactive, relationship-centred care, inclusion in a social environment with meaningful activities and autonomy, nutritious meals and a strong sense of safety and security is supporting many older people to really thrive.

Good practice is dependent upon the extraordinary efforts of skilled, resilient, and empowered care teams, with a strong community supporting them. Join us for a webinar on 16th April 2025 to see how these ‘Thriving’ themes are being embedded into care services.