Activities at The Fernes Care Home
At The Fernes we endeavour to make our care as personal as possible, including when it comes to activities. We will give you a 'Getting to Know Me' booklet for you to fill out with your loved one before they arrive, which includes a little life history and a tick sheet for a vast amount of activities. This enables us to offer the activities we know they will enjoy and enables us to learn valuable information about their lives and what might stimulate them in conversations and trips.
Our specialist Activities and Lifestyle staff make sure there are always meaningful activities to take part in, such as helping in the garden, baking some bread to have with our dinner, and trips out to various locations nearby such as the beach and the garden centres. Residents are encouraged to take part, but it is always the resident’s choice to participate or not as we believe that having choice is very important to help our residents feel in control of their lives. There are activities on offer every day (and night for those night owls) in the form of word puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, arts and crafts, needle crafts and board games to name a few. We have entertainment that is organised at least twice a month such as Music for Health, Zoolab or musicians, and also have a wonderful Yoga instructor who comes every other week.
Activities are provided by everyone in our home from carers and specialised activities staff, right through to our admin team. If there is a task that needs doing and a resident would like to do it, such as sealing envelopes and putting stamps on or handing out popcorn for our Movie Mondays, they are very welcome to help out which enables us to give them a better feeling of purpose and self-worth.
We are a registered member of the National Activity Providers Association (NAPA), which means that we are always working to make the quality of life of all of our residents as high as possible by working with person-centred activities that aim to stimulate our residents, both mentally and physically.
Sophie Wasteney
Hi, I'm Sophie, I am the Activities Lead at The Fernes. I've worked in the care sector for 26 years and here at The Fernes for 3 of those. When I started here I worked in care so really got to know the residents, relatives and home very well. When the Activities Lead role arose I naturally jumped at the opportunity as it was one aspect of care I really wanted to do as I really enjoy making people happy. As you cannot put a price on a smile!
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 The Fernes Care Home
Planting for Winter
We have started to pot up the amaryllis in time for the Christmas bloom, Ann one of our lovely volunteers helped with this, we can’t wait to see them blossom into beautiful colours.
Bonfire Night
Always a huge hit for us here, we love celebrating with hot chocolates, cocktails and sparklers, mind you we don’t need an excuse here to have a tipple, we also enjoy weekly cocktail evenings on our top floor balcony.
A Huge Congratulations to Myra!
We are proud to announce that our very own Myra Wadhams has been awarded Dementia Care Champion at this year’s Barchester Care Awards.
Thousands of nominations were received from our homes and hospitals across the UK. All entries were a very high standard and Myra is over the moon to have been named National Winner, beating hundreds of other nominees.
Myra joined winners from across the UK at a special awards event on the 12th of October to celebrate their outstanding achievements and to receive their awards.
Well done and huge congratulations from everyone at The Fernes
A Trip to the Beach
Making the most of the last few days of sunshine we headed over to our favourite seaside café. Using binoculars, we looked out at the ships docked over in Portsmouth. We watched all the seaside birds and spent time reminiscing about our seaside memories.
Cocktails at Florence Court
Who doesn’t love a cocktail? We took some of our residents and headed over to Florence Court's rooftop bar for a cocktail or two. Our residents loved meeting the residents of our sister home and they all hit it off straight away with a WOO WOO in hand!
A visit from the Children of St Columbia School
The students of St Columbia came into our home to ask our residents about their memories and experiences during and after WWll. They loved getting a chance to tell their story and really show the younger generation the differences between then and now.
