Amid a worrying national decline in dementia care quality, WCS Care’s Woodside Care Village in Warwick is an example of how it should be done. Lee Peart went along last month to see what makes Woodside so special.

On arriving at Woodside I was required to take a Covid test and don a mask before being admitted through the front security door. Over the Christmas and New Year period, the home had maintained tight infection control procedures which were supported by residents and families, including mask wearing by staff and visitors.

After being welcomed with tea and a croissant by Woodside’s friendly receptionist Megan, I sat and waited for my tour of the home in the ‘A Cup Above’ café. I was immediately struck by the warm, welcoming and relaxed atmosphere. Soothing Phil Collins music played in the café and reception area, which was full of light thanks to the large windows facing out onto the central Village Plaza.

It was not long before the café filled up for a game of bingo led by some of the support workers using a Tiny Tablet interactive screen. As the room filled I was joined by home manager Samantha Stuart and director of marketing and communications Jo Cheshire who ushered me into the home’s cinema, which plays classic movies 24-7.

“There’s always a film on so if people walk past and glance in they can choose to come in and sit down and watch for a bit,” Jo said. Residents are also able to use the cinema screen with the home’s exercise bike while watching videos and virtually cycling around towns and cities such as Warwick and Paris. Based on the Dutch De Hogeweyk model, where residents roam freely in a community style, deinstutionalised setting, Woodside Care Village was built on the site of an old WCS Care home in 2019. The village is split into 12 households of five to seven residents.

The households are designed along the lifestyle themes of Country, Town and Classical living to help build communities of people with similar hobbies, interests and personalities. “When people move in, we ask so many questions about who they are or who they were to find out whether they would fit in with the other people living in their household,” Sam told me.

Residents in each household are cared for by two staff who share the same hobbies and interests so that they are able to form a very close bond. Jo added: “The household model really worked well during Covid. We had one Covid case when a resident came in from hospital during the first wave, but we were able to contain it and it didn’t spread between the staff and residents.”

It’s surprising to hear there are 72 residents in the village as its V-shaped design provides a much smaller and intimate feel than the typical care home. I was interested to learn that while half of the households cater for people living with dementia, the other half houses residential care, with two households devoted to deaf people.

“We are attracting more residential customers because people are seeing us as a positive choice,” Jo observed. “We saw more people choosing to live in a home like this after Covid because they realised how lonely or isolated they were and wanted to live in a community with people around them.

“Some of our deaf residents are much younger and they are out and about in the community all the time.” Sam said: “People were worried a little bit about whether mixing younger and older residents would work at the beginning, but they are so beautiful to watch together. The younger residents will help the elderly and the elderly enjoy having fun with the younger residents who always make them laugh.”

Amazingly, the ages of residents in the home ranges from 26 to 103!
The Village Plaza acts as the focal point of the village where residents can roam freely in the garden, play crazy golf and table tennis or visit the launderette, community zone, hair and beauty salon, or go to choose their lunch from the mini-market, which provides an amazing 42 options of hot meals supplied by apetito, as well as soup, vegetables, potatoes, desserts and fresh produce that residents can choose to take back to their households to cook with their support workers. The garden in the Plaza looks out invitingly onto the surrounding neighbourhood with benches situated so residents can sit and watch the passing traffic and pedestrians, and even interact with people as they pass by.

The home also uses a range of technology from electronic care planning, to night-time acoustic monitoring (which includes cameras for those residents who choose them) and circadian lighting, all aimed at improving the health and wellbeing of residents.

WCS Care’s core value of ‘kindness’ extends to how the not-for-profit provider treats its staff. “They are not just a number here,” Sam said. “They have a benefits platform and get discounts at certain shops and are able to get counselling and financial and housing advice.

“People don’t go into care for the money, it’s more about their passion to care, but we still pay our teams above National Minimum Wage which has really helped especially through such hard times.”

Each new starter is given a fleece with a ‘Care Hero’ label. As of this year, the label will also display the starting year the colleague joined the business. Colleagues are encouraged to champion areas such as infection control and become team leaders and move up to more senior roles.

“Our head of learning and development has introduced a management college in the last few years,” Jo said. “There are opportunities to do NVQs and Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications.”

Woodside Care Village was also one of the first WCS homes to roll out the BookJane shift management app which has drastically reduced the number of agency shifts from 112 at the beginning of December to four by the middle of January.

“We are seeing that more money is going into the pockets of our staff who are picking up additional shifts,” Jo observed. “You also have the knock- on effect of better-quality care with residents being cared for by the same care teams and people.”

In a further innovation, WCS Care has also introduced a ‘Mobile Carers’ network so that staff can work between homes and share shifts. “It offers the same flexibility as working for an agency, but you also get the company benefits of annual leave and other incentives,” Sam noted. With so much innovation and best practice on offer, providers could do a lot worse than paying a visit to Woodside Care Village to learn the WCS Care way.