Dame Eleanor Laing MP Attends our Afternoon Celebrations

We celebrated 10 years of caring last Friday. It is really amazing how time has flown by. Since signing up our first home help client in January 201, with myself and my Care Manager alternating the visits, we have grown to the size we are today – in the last year we have provided almost 70,000 hours of care to our clients in Epping Forest! What a wonderful achievement.

I am so proud of the team I have built, with several team members being with me from the start. Jean is currently our longest serving employee having just received her 10-year award, but there are other team members who will also complete ten years’ service this year – we must be doing something right! Many of the office team started as Care Professionals and so know what we do from their own experience out in the field, and I do believe they can therefore understand better the needs of our clients and Care Professionals.

We celebrated with an afternoon reception for staff, clients, and their families plus people from the community.

Dame Eleanor Laing MP had cut the ribbon 10 years earlier to celebrate the opening of the business and so it was very fitting that she was able to cut the cake at the 10-year anniversary.

Milestones achieved in the last 10 years:

• Achieved an ‘Outstanding’ rating by the Care Quality Commission, the highest award you can get.
• We won the prestigious Home Instead PEAQ award. Every year (except COVID years) we ask our clients to complete a survey on us. All Home Instead Offices take part in this and the results are independently compiled. In December 2018 we won the PEAQ award for the best client scores.
• In 2021 the PEAQ results from our staff enabled us to be awarded the Employer of Choice 2021, 5 Star Award from WorkBuzz. We narrowly missed out on this in 2022 by not having enough completed surveys and so we will try and encourage everyone to complete their survey this year!

Some of our clients and client family members and friends attended and took the opportunity to chat to the office team members and Care Professionals. We were very pleased Mark, a family friend of one of our clients, Vera attended, Vera is the client who has been using our services the longest – 9 years.

We had several information hubs set up:

• Our Raizer Chair – this is a valuable piece of equipment as, in certain circumstances, it can be used to help some one who has fallen over get back into a standing position. There are many advantages of being able to use this piece of equipment the main ones being it can save a client many uncomfortable hours waiting for the paramedics to arrive and assist and also saves the paramedics a call out. Caroline, Debbie and Vicky were on hand to explain its use and offer demonstrations.
• Maureen also ran a demonstration of our latest activity – DanceSIng , chair based dancing and singing which we will role out in July as a monthly session but it will also be available for Care Professionals to use with their clients on a one to one basis.
• Debbie had information on a dementia awareness workshop she hopes to run in June for families and friends of people living with dementia. We are creating a list of interested people to attend this workshop. If you would like to be included please let me know. A date will be set at a time when most people can make the event.
• Debbie was also there to discuss our Charity Walk – 17 June we will be walking the Centenary Walk through Epping Forest. We are looking for people to walk all/some of it with us and we are also looking for sponsorship! All monies raised will be going to Our National Home Instead Charity but the monies raised will be earmarked for events in Epping Forest.

We had several We now run two monthly events at Theydon Bois Village Hall: A Memory Lane Café afternoon and  a Singing for the Brain morning and soon to be added is our third monthly event – DanceSing afternoon which has been discussed above.

I am so proud of what we have achieved in the last ten years and look forward to the next ten years!