Tips For Promoting Dignity In Care At Your Home

Ensuring that your residents are cared for in a dignified and respectful manner is a top priority for Homes. In fact, it’s even one of the CQC’s top regulations, so promoting dignity in care is key to passing CQC inspections.

We all have a general idea of what dignity and respect looks like, but when you’re running a Home, this sort of thing needs planning and managing! So, we’ve created a quick list of a few easy things you can do to promote dignity in care at your home.

Decision-making

When moving into a care home, residents are effectively (or literally) institutionalised. No matter how hard we try, this involves limiting the resident’s ability to make their own decisions.

Letting residents make as many decisions for themselves as possible helps them to feel independent. Some examples include…

• Deciding when to make a cup of tea.
• Deciding which TV channel to watch.
• Deciding which room they want to be in.
• Deciding what they would like to eat at mealtimes (as in, selecting from a menu).

Clothing

Clothing is another facet of decision-making. While it is often quicker and easier for carers to lay out an outfit for residents to get changed into, allowing residents to make the decision themselves will help them to feel more independent.

As discussed in the section above, independence and decision-making is an important part of ensuring your residents receive dignity in care.

Mealtimes

It’s always nice to have a meal made for you, and a lot of residents look forwards to mealtimes. One great way to promote dignity in care is by putting in the effort to serve quality meals, and by offering a choice of courses.

A choice of well-presented, tasty courses at mealtimes demonstrates that your Home cares about residents’ quality of life, and allows them to make important day-to-day decisions themselves.

Possessions

From the moment your residents move in, your Home is their Home! Respecting people’s personal possessions is essential, since personal items can be incredibly sentimental, and help residents feel comfortable in unfamiliar environments.

Respecting residents’ belongings can look like…

• Asking permission before touching objects during cleaning, and making sure to replace them properly.
• Handling items only when necessary, and with great care.
• If an item seems sentimental to a resident, ask them about it when you get a spare moment – they may enjoy telling you about its backstory.

Doing this will build trust with your residents. Needless to say, treating a person’s belongings with respect is necessary for promoting dignity in care.

Hygiene & Personal Care

Feeling good about your cleanliness and appearance is an intrinsic part of individuals’ self-confidence, and your residents are no different.

For example, many homes have salon days for their staff, and book a specialist hairdresser to give the residents a trim. Looking and feeling good (and clean) is an essential prerequisite for maintaining dignity in care.

Another aspect to be aware of is bathing and cleaning residents who are unable to do this themselves. Chances are, this will be a very uncomfortable experience for them. The best thing to do is provide any reassurance necessary, cover areas that aren’t being washed to maintain the resident’s dignity, and be receptive to any requests the resident has.

Activities

It’s an unfortunate fact that people tend to get less physically able as they age. For some, this can mean forgoing activities they once enjoyed, such as dancing, or gardening.

It doesn’t have to be this way though – by holding events and activities, or introducing specialist facilities (such as raised garden beds to prevent people from having to get down on their knees), it’s possible to get your residents engaged in hobbies they’d otherwise have to give up on.

Socialising

Whether it’s with staff, family, friends, or other residents, ensuring that your Residents have plenty of opportunity to socialise is critical when it comes to upholding dignity in care.

Where possible, enable residents to visit family, have meals out etc. – but also ensure your staff have room in their timetable to stop and chat for a while. Everyone likes being listened to!

Summary: Tips For Promoting Dignity In Care

Hopefully your home is nailing most of these, if not all of them! At the end of the day, the sections we’ve covered are fairly basic. Running a compassionate, dignified, and respectful Home takes more than just tips, you’ll have to work with your staff to promote a broader workplace culture.

How Agency Staff Can Help

If your home has worked hard to promote a healthy, respectful internal culture, it can feel like a let-down to bring in agency staff who you don’t know or trust, but sometimes that’s a necessity – if the alternative is going short-staffed, that’s even worse!

But at Medilink Nursing, this isn’t a concern. We carefully vet all of our staff – the rule we go by, is that if we wouldn’t want them looking after our relatives, we don’t want them looking after your residents either! We also have a strict minimum UK-based experience requirement, to ensure all our staff are familiar with UK home settings and norms.

If you’ve got any questions about what we do, we’re always happy to chat. You can reach us on 0113 877 6383 any day, and any time between 6:00am and 10:30pm.