If you were moving into a care home tomorrow, what would you want the people caring for you to know about you?
It sounds like a straightforward question. After all, who knows us better than we know ourselves? But when our team members were asked to answer it during a recent training session at the Evolve Care Academy, many found it surprisingly difficult.
The exercise began with a small brown cardboard luggage label placed on each table. Before anyone picked up their pens, Evolve Care Group’s Clinical Director, Eve Carder, shared a story about a gentleman who had recently moved into one of our care homes.
He had arrived carrying just one small brown suitcase. Attached to it was a luggage label with his name and address. And that was almost everything the team knew about him, aside from his clinical diagnosis.
Most of the time, when someone moves into one of our homes, their loved ones share as much information as they can about the person.
We might learn about their childhood, the work they did, the people they love, their interests, their daily routines and the little things that matter to them. All these details give our teams a starting point for understanding who someone is, beyond their immediate care needs.
As Eve explained during the session, ‘The more pieces of the puzzle we have, the better.’
But not everyone arrives with someone who can help us put those pieces together. Some people may have no surviving family. Others may have become estranged from their loved ones, or their circumstances may mean that very little information is available about their past.
Imagine arriving in a new home where nobody knows your favourite music, what makes you laugh, whether you enjoy company or prefer time alone. Nobody knows what you did for a living, what you are proud of, or which particular experiences in your past still affect you every day.
These things may not appear in a medical assessment, but they can make an enormous difference to how someone experiences care.
Knowing that someone has always enjoyed gardening might help our team members find ways for them to continue doing something they love.
Understanding that someone has experienced a significant loss might help explain why certain conversations, dates or situations are difficult for them.
Learning that someone has always been independent and dislikes having decisions made for them can influence how we approach their everyday support.
What Would You Put on Your Luggage Label?
With the gentleman’s story in mind, our team members turned their attention to the luggage labels on their tables.
They were asked to imagine that they were the ones arriving somewhere new, surrounded by people who knew nothing about them, and consider what they would want those people to know, so they could understand them and provide the kind of care that was right for them.
The exercise included several questions to encourage team members to think beyond the obvious details.
What words would they use to describe themselves? Who were the most important people in their lives? What were they most proud of? What was the one thing they would want somebody to understand about them? What was something they were ashamed of, or that brought them distress?
For many, this was harder than expected.
It is one thing to introduce yourself by your name, your job or where you come from. It is quite another to decide which parts of your life are important enough to tell a complete stranger, particularly if that stranger is going to be responsible for your care.
Our team members had to consider what made them who they were, what they valued and what they might need from the people around them.
The People Behind the Labels
Once everyone had finished writing, the labels were collected and hung throughout the training room for everyone to read.
Importantly, no names were included, giving team members the space to be as open and honest as they wished, without having to identify themselves.
Some labels spoke about family and children. Others mentioned hobbies, interests and achievements that they were proud of.
One person described themselves as kind-hearted, writing about their love of music, travelling and trying new foods. They also shared that they missed their mum, who was no longer with them. Each label offered a small glimpse into someone’s life.
Getting to Know the Person, Not Just Their Care Needs
The exercise brought everyone back to the gentleman with the brown suitcase, but with a greater appreciation of just how much there could be to discover about him.
Seeing all those luggage labels hanging together was a reminder of just how many different things make us who we are, and how much of a person’s identity might not be immediately obvious.
Even when we think we know someone well, there may still be experiences they haven’t spoken about, interests we haven’t discovered, or things that matter deeply to them that we haven’t yet understood.
For those family members who move into our homes who are on a cognitive or Dementia journey, it is not as simple as asking them to sit down and tell us the story of their lives. Being asked multiple direct questions could leave them feeling confused or overwhelmed, causing them to shut down and struggle to respond.
Sometimes, the information comes through many smaller conversations over a period of time. Other times, it comes from observing the little things: the music someone responds to, the activities they gravitate towards, or the routines they seem to prefer.
And when someone is unable to tell us these things themselves, it becomes all the more important to make the effort to listen, notice, and keep building our understanding of who they are gradually.
A person’s story doesn’t begin when they move into a care home, and getting to know them isn’t something that happens only in those first few weeks. It is something that continues throughout their time with us and something we should never stop being curious about.
To read more about training, learning and development provided by Evolve Care Group in their Evolve Care Academy, click here.