Dementia Care

Outstanding Dementia Care

At Coast Care Homes, we continuously endeavour to work with the most progressive developments in Dementia care. We have moved away from the historic “one size fits all” approach. Key to our care plan is promoting choice and independence within a loving and stimulating environment. Our attitude towards Dementia Care is always to try to secure a quality of life for each individual resident based on what they are able to achieve on a day-to-day basis.

Instead of focusing on the limitations of memory loss, our team of highly qualified and experienced staff strive to emphasise and work with what residents are able to do and the activities that they can enjoy. Memory loss and confusion can sometimes be upsetting for residents so all staff members are encouraged to offer residents support through being tactile and loving in the care that they offer. It is this loving, specialist care that makes us unique and is reflected in Coast Care Homes status as a Preferred Provider to East Sussex County Council.

Consistency

We value all of our residents’ different personalities, striving at all times to recognise and appreciate their whole life achievements and their many contributions to both their families and to society in general. We work closely with all other local health professionals to meet our residents’ physical, mental and emotional needs, maintaining close relationships with the surgeries and hospitals in the surrounding areas of Hastings and Bexhill to ensure consistent, high-quality care is provided.

We have been very successful in providing a high quality of life to residents who are perceived to have challenging behaviours. Our approach to person-centred care and building a bespoke care routine for residents with complex behavioural needs, has allowed us to successfully manage residents needs who have failed to settle in other placements.

In Summary

• Coast Care Homes are care homes for the elderly with Dementia, Alzheimers and Parkinsons. We are one of the most progressive care home providers Sussex and surrounding areas.
• Short-term respite care and long-term care is provided 24 hours a day by a team of fully trained and experienced staff.
• We are a preferred provider to ESCC
• Homes in Seaside locations in St Leonards, Hastings and Bexhill.

Our Daily Group Outings

We have two large 18-seater minibuses, employ four East Sussex trained drivers, and run daily group outings to cafe’s, pubs, shops, garden centres, theatres, local attractions, etc, from each of our four homes. We have delivered approximately 6000 outings over the last decade, equating to nearly 50,000 individual days out (where otherwise, those days would have been spent in the care home). We also have a smaller minibus and wheelchair accessible cars, which allows us to take both individuals and focused groups out for more personalised outcomes.

We passionately believe that a lived experience of a service user, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week in a care/nursing home is detrimental to their mental wellbeing and a major contributing factor to heightened anxieties and challenging behaviour. Therefore, our minibus outings act like a pressure relief valve, providing our service users with a rhythm of life that is more closely matched to how they would have lived before being admitted into care.

It is extremely unique for outings to be offered at this scale within a care setting, especially to service users with complex clinical needs, and this is just one of the reasons why we have succeeded with placements that have failed elsewhere.

Additionally, we also have our own holiday home, which has full disabled access for service users, carers, and family members to visit as frequently as they wish. We focus intensively on learning each service user’s life history to extract ‘golden nuggets’ from their past, which enables us to validate them as individuals and provides them with a clearer sense of who they are, what they have achieved and why they are here.

Our Ethos

At Coast Care Homes, our approach to managing dementia is centred around understanding what people with dementia are going through and how they feel. We feel that anyone with an advancing dementia has a loop tape playing that’s saying Who am I? Why am I here? What have I done?

We know who we are. We know why we’re here. We know what we’ve done. If you don’t know that on an hour to hour, day-to-day level, it’s very frightening. It creates anxiety and it creates fear. Because of this, as soon as someone is cared for by Coast Care Homes, we need to know their life history.

We want to know where they come, from their schooling, their jobs, their education, their family, their triumphs, their disasters, their loves, their hates, their passions. All the things that someone has lived in their life, we want to know that and we want families to give us that information. We then use that information in the care delivery every day and we try and bring that person back to their lived experience.

What we know about dementia is that people often have good long-term memories, so they can connect back to their past, but they’ve only just disconnected temporarily. We just provide that link and validate our residents to try and connect them to their past.

We can bring the anxiety levels down and being able to provide great outcomes and great opportunities and great activities, relies on us being able to bring people’s anxieties down, and this is a great way of doing that.

We talk about people’s life histories, we talk about who they are, we connect them back to who they are. But we also want to involve them. It’s their home, it’s their family home. It is very difficult for the families that we work with who are seeing their loved ones lose parts of their capacity, part of their cognitive ability, part of their personality. We as Coast Care, however, remain focused on the parts of that person’s capacity and personality that are still there.