Enter and view: Mandeville Grange Care Home

Healthwatch Buckhingamshire conducted an Enter and View visit to Mandeville Grange care home in January 2019. This visit was part of the Enter and View schedule for the Dignity in Care programme. Mandeville Grange provides nursing care for 26 residents, some of whom live with dementia. They interviewed to 5 residents, 3 visitors and 2 staff and observed another 5 residents and 3 staff.

Residents reported that the staff were kind and attentive; there was no choice of main meal at lunchtime but that an alternative would be found; residents felt there was no opportunity to help in the home, for example, decorating biscuits or planting bulbs in the garden; and that activities were not varied, nor was there an opportunity for group activities and outside excursions. Observations included: staff interacted well with residents, and visitors; and there was no dining room table which mean residents often sat in the same chair all day.

Recommendations were made by the representatives including: introduce a choice of two main meals at lunch time; put up a weekly menu; make healthy snacks available; consider clearing the “quiet room”, off the main lounge, and installing a dining table for 6-8 with chairs so residents could eat meals at a dining table if they so wished; ensure appropriate risk assessments take place to enable those who want to go out unaccompanied to do so where possible; increases the number, and variety, of trips out for those residents who would like to go out e.g. to the cinema, theatre, shops; increase the number of group activities in the lounge areas to get residents talking to each other and making them less dependent on the activity coordinator for all activities; ask residents what they would like to do but consider introducing card games and board games such as Ludo, baking, and planting seeds, activities, in the ‘quiet room’ and knitting; enable more residents to go out into the community, visit the local school, shops and brings more groups into the home such as Scouts, Girlguides and local school children; and sign up to the Bucks Home Library Service as several of their residents read regularly but don’t leave the home often to purchase books.

The service provider responded well to some of the recommendations but disagreed with the comments regarding activities and socialising.