This Christmas at Excelcare, our mission has been to make everyone’s Christmas merry and bright, while celebrating partnership and community spirit! To aid in this venture, each of our care homes were given an increased budget to shine bright for Christmas 2020
At the beginning of November, each care home in the group was challenged to decorate both inside and out with lights, tinsel and trinkets in order to shine bright and spread festive spirit, for the people who live and work there, and also to the surrounding community. While our frontline teams are always busy decorating at this time of year, we wanted this year to be bigger and better than ever before. To us, our Christmas lights shining bright are also a way of remembering those we have lost this year, as a celebration of their lives
On Thursday 3rd December, Excelcare held their first-ever synchronised Christmas Light Switch-on, with care homes across the group inviting residents, relatives and friends of their homes to celebrate with them in person and virtually, as they watched their lights shine for the first time and joined together in carol singing to spread festive cheer. Many of our care homes took to Facebook to share a live stream of the event, as well as photos and videos of the precious memories created on the day
In the lead up to the event, care homes were supported by Central Support Teams to reach out to their communities, asking for help and involvement with their festive planning and help in delivering our Christmas promise. Care homes were overwhelmed with the many generous donations of lights, decorations and well wishes, all kindly given whilst respecting social distancing limitations
At Excelcare we are all family - and as with all families, a little healthy competition is a good thing! So, with all homes shining more than ever before and adorned with lights galore, we will choose the Excelcare Region with the most innovative, bright and meaningful theme on December 18th
The winning region will receive an amazing interactive touch screen activity tables that will enhance care home activities and boost resident's wellbeing. Specially designed for care homes, each table is portable allowing them to be easily moved from room to room, and provide a mixture of fun, learning, music, films, nostalgia, sensory activities and games. They can provide daily entertainment and stimulation to older people, including people who live with Dementia
We are incredibly grateful to all who helped to make this fantastic event possible; we hope that you all feel proud to have been a part of something so special. We cannot thank you enough for all of your support during these unprecedented times
For the rest of the Christmas period, each of our care homes will light up daily from 4pm, we hope that seeing the lights as you pass by will bring all of our local communities Christmas joy! We hope our care home shining bright will bring some festive joy to you all as you go on your daily walks
Please enjoy viewing your local care home’s Facebook page by following the below links to see how they celebrated and join in the conversation!