How Hamberley Homes provide meaningful activities for older adults in their care homes thanks to the Oomph! Wellbeing and Activities Platform

Verwood House, part of Hamberley Care Homes

About Hamberley Homes 

With 20 care homes across the Midlands and the south of England, Hamberley Care Homes provides residential, nursing, respite and dementia care and strive to help people continue to live the life they want with a philosophy of happiness, harmony and genuine home-like communities. 

Emilia Turner, Wellbeing Coach at Hamberley-owned Verwood House, discusses the transformative change that the Oomph! OnDemand Wellbeing and Activities Platform has had on care home residents’ quality of life. 

Why did you decide to implement? 

As a Wellbeing Coach, you could say my main goal is to ensure that the resident quality of life is always of the highest possible standard. While it goes without saying that we always ensure absolute safety, efficiency and smooth, streamlined operations – you can’t have a care home that achieves outstanding outcomes without the aforementioned – for a long time I have recognised that the real difference between great care and truly outstanding care are the intangibles, the little things, the touches of home that make residents feel like they are part of a real community – that they live in a real family home.  

So, I always ask myself the question: how can we ensure that the goal of person-centred care is not only being met, but exceeded? 

Needless to say, activities that focus on wellbeing are a big component of how we go about achieving that goal. Everyone on the team and I always strived to deliver engaging and fun-filled activities; we brainstormed a lot and tried to keep our ideas fresh so that it wasn’t just the case of doing boardgames or crosswords over and over again.  

But with the best will in the world, a care home is an extremely busy work environment, and though we always tried to set time aside to do research online, to gather ideas and to brainstorm ideas for our residents, there are only so many things you can come up with before you hit a bit of a brick wall. This is why we decided to implement the Oomph! On-Demand Wellbeing and Activities Platform; it provides an enormous number of activities that come in such refreshing and interesting variety that you’ll always have something new to share with your residents, and you’ll always be able to keep things fun and varied because the platform is constantly updated with new content, so no one gets bored. 

The On-Demand platform is totally unique in how it can help you deliver activities that, like I said before, really make the difference in providing the best possible person-centred care. The sheer amount of different and individually tailored activities provides us with a range of ideas that just weren’t available to us before.  

Not only that, but the way it has helped us to really transform the way in which we can upskill and train our staff in wellbeing training has meant that our whole-home approach to wellbeing activities has gone from strength to strength. 

How has the platform impacted your day-to-day processes? 

The change is totally night and day in terms of the process. A big part of my job is to provide enriching, meaningful activities to residents and the On-Demand platform gives me the tools to do just that. It means we can pinpoint individual interests to a far greater extent than we could before because the platform provides such unique and easily tailorable content.  

Before we had the platform, ensuring that every resident had the opportunity to partake in activities, whether it was tailored for exercise requirements, nutrition, being dementia friendly or just to do with their particular interests, was always a challenge. Now with the On-Demand platform however, we can go through resident’s life stories and tailor content to each person, or tailor activities to smaller groups – so that whether someone has dementia or sensory challenges like impaired sight or hearing, there isn’t just something for them, there’s a lot of things for them!  

And that’s even before delving into the various ideas centred around theme days. Usually, we look at theme days coming up and get everybody in the community involved in some fun and exciting activities. During the Christmas period, for example, we had so many opportunities to have some festive fun with residents. Whether it’s any one of festive baking recipes, or the craft activities available, or even the carol singing activities, it gave us the chance to make the holidays even more special for our residents than we could have ever imagined. 

I could go on all day about how the On-Demand platform has transformed what we do and the quality of life through wellbeing activities we have been able to provide, not just for residents but for staff too, but if I had to sum it up briefly, I’d say that it’s changed our process dramatically and my experiences have been really positive because it now means we can really hone in on what person-centred care through wellbeing and activities means for each person.  

What positive feedback can you share? 

The platform’s seemingly endless list of new and fun activity ideas means very much makes it feel like no two days are the same. We can always make sure that we can bring fresh and exciting activities to our residents but what we’ve found especially is that the staff really enjoy partaking in them as well. 

It’s true that not everybody will like the same activities because we recognise that each of our residents have unique and different interests, preferences and life stories, but with the On-Demand platform we’ve found that both residents and staff really look forward to the activities that we provide. There’s always something for everyone, and while that doesn’t sound like much, in a care home setting it really makes all the difference.

What are the most popular activities? 

It’s a difficult question to answer because there are so many different activities that our residents and staff enjoy, but if I had to pick some in particular, I’d say the Golden Classics, as well as the exercises – they really make a world of difference to the residents because it helps them maintain their muscle and bone strength, so as a result they are less at risk of issues like falls.  

The virtual tours are also incredible, our residents love them! One of our residents used to go abroad often, and now obviously that isn’t really a possibility, but with the virtual tours, you can provide a really powerful means of helping them to stay connected with the things they used to enjoy doing and the life they have lived.  

We also tend to find that the most popular activities range based on the specific needs of the residents. For example, if we have residents that are living with dementia, they might not have the ability to concentrate on an activity that lasts, for example, an hour. But there is so much variety not just in the content itself but the length of content, so we are able to utilise bite-sized, five-minute activities that really help them stay engaged. One of the most popular of these is the Five-Minute Exercise activities.  

That’s just to name a few, there are so many to choose from; care providers really need to look for themselves and they’ll see just how many there are! 

Would you recommend The Oomph! Wellbeing and Activities Platform? 

I would definitely recommend it because it really enhances residents’ experience. And from our experience, it’s been an amazing service because it provides the means for staff to spend real, quality time with residents doing things they know for certain they will enjoy. 

To any care home thinking about investing in the Oomph! On-Demand Wellbeing and Activities Platform, you won’t regret it!