Activities at Kernow House Care Home
Our Activities Coordinators organise varied and regular events. The activities that take place depend on what our residents tell us they are interested in and the feedback we get from their families. We currently have pop-up cafes where we socialise and maybe visit the hairdresser. We have regular live music events, a storyteller and visits from animals and we are often joined by families or friends during our social activities where they are always most welcome.
Living in Cornwall the surrounding countryside offers many beauty spots and we often have trips out to wherever our residents would like to go. At other times a walk to nearby shops or cafes is what we enjoy.
Louise is our hairdresser and she is with us twice a week. Louise also supports us during our weekly Namaste sessions where she offers hand massages in a relaxing environment. Every Thursday afternoon we have a time of worship supported by our local community. Our ice cream van, Kernow Kones, and our mobile pub, Kernow Keg, also make a weekly appearance. We have monthly clubs, when we play bingo or watch a film in our pop-up cinema. Residents on all units are invited to take part in a monthly Resident’s Meeting and they tell us what they would like.
Apart from these regular events, we also celebrate special occasions and often have musical entertainers to visit but we also make our own fun. All staff take part in fancy dress or charity events that we support and often what we do evolves through interaction between residents and care or activity staff. All this makes Kernow House a vibrant place to be where things happen both as group activities as well as on an individual level.
Bea Porup
Bea has many years of experience working in elderly care and both experience and training in dementia care. She has also worked extensively with people with Huntington's disease. Bea works closely with Sue, Jackie and our management team, nurses, carers and kitchen team to ensure our home has a vibrant environment with lots of events happening and varied opportunities for having both new and familiar experiences, making sure the people living here lead a rich and fulfilling life.
Read our brochure 'Life-enriching activities' for more information about life in our care homes.
Read our brochure
Activities and Events Partnerships
As part of our bespoke life-enrichment programmes, we host a number of live virtual events in the home on a regular basis through a number of partnerships with places of interest and world class performance companies
Life at Kernow House Care Home
Residents' Meeting
Every month, we hold a meeting for residents on every unit. Currently, we do this in small groups or we approach residents individually. We have a set agenda with questions about how residents feel they are cared for, if they feel safe, what they are happy about or unhappy about. We then act on what residents tell us they want. Minutes are written and distributed on each unit. It’s a great way of making sure everyone gets a chance to have their say and affect their lives at Kernow.
World Food Day
This year, we chose to focus on sustainable and locally produced food on World Food Day. As it was Friday, lunch was traditional fish and chips with the fish caught fairly locally at Brixham.
All our food is locally sourced, so we came up with an idea of getting local beer and ales for our pub trolley. What a popular thing to do! We had cider, ale, lager and Cornish lemonade made with freshly squeezed lemons and Cornish spring water. We even had Cornish chocolate with sea salt and, the best thing is, that there’s plenty left over for next Friday.
Harvest Festival
We have good support from Barchester’s Life Enrichment team. They suggest many things we can do and taking part in a Harvest Festival competition was one of these.
We made salt dough fruit, vegetables and other things suited for a harvest celebration. Being creative is very relaxing and we have some laughs while we sit together and do something we would not usually do.
National Recycling Week
We have had some fun making new friends out of recycled materials and repurposing things we had lying around. The teddy in a box is a companion for one we already had. The grass heads and the grass worm will be looked after and watered well until their hair is as long as rest of ours.
We already recycle everything we can at Kernow, but it’s good to draw attention to a good cause sometimes.
World's Biggest Coffee Morning
Although guidelines tell us we cannot have a social event like a coffee morning where we bring lots of people together, there’s nothing to say we can’t tip everything on its head and bring the coffee morning to lots of people.
That is exactly what we did for MacMillan’s World’s Biggest Coffee Morning. We bought in lots of cake and shared it out for all residents and staff to take part. We also had a 50 pence sale and a raffle. Both events took place remotely. We raised £119.63 for MacMillan.
Thank you for helping us support the charity.
International Dot Day
There are many awareness days in the calendar; International Dot Day is one of these. If we were still able to have visits from the school children, we would have worked with them, but as they are not physically here, we held our own Dot Day.
We read Peter H. Reynolds' tale ‘The Dot’, which is about making a mark and seeing where it takes you. At Kernow, many of us made our mark on muffin cases and we then made this collage. We will write to the children and show them what we did – that way we still keep in touch.
