Relationship Centred Care™

A Relational Approach to Care Provision

The foundation of any therapeutic care activity is to understand the person’s past and present relationships. By engaging with this most important aspect of the human experience, residents feel empowered to talk about their memories, to be heard and to feel valued.

With this in mind, we have adopted Relationship Centred Care as the principle approach to our care provision. This approach takes the well-established concept of Person Centred Care one step further, by putting each resident at the heart of a network of family, friends, and those that work in the home.

Relationship Centred Care can be illustrated by a “relationship triangle”, which highlights a “third dimension”: where carers and the resident’s loved ones develop relationships with each other, in addition to their traditional relationships with residents.

In order to develop this third dimension, some of our recent initiatives are as follows:

Residents’ Life Histories

These are an excellent way to get to know the residents better. They empower residents to talk about their memories and give them a chance to reminisce and feel heard. They are also beneficial
to staff by helping them to understand residents’ care needs from a much wider, more relational, perspective. Where possible, the histories are compiled by friends and families and they ideally include testimonials by significant people in residents’ earlier lives.

Contact with Wider Family & Friends

When residents move into care, it is often difficult for relationships with their wider family and friends to be maintained. In order to help them to keep in touch, our aim is to maintain contact details for all residents’ children and grand-children. These can then be used for party invitations, newsletters and updates on residents’ social programmes. We are placing particular emphasis on building relationships with residents’ grand-children (usually in their 20’s/30’s), as residents really value contact with them and this age group is often reluctant to visit care facilities.

Secure Online Access to Care Plans and Daily Reports for Relatives and Friends

Our residents’ care plans and care records are streamed in real time into our platform, Care Records Online (this is strictly subject to the resident’s consent or to a “best interest decision” on their behalf). Relatives are finding that having a live view to their loved one’s care, accessible from anywhere, really helps them to have peace of mind, as well as to maintain stronger relationships with both the resident and staff.

You can read more about our digital initiatives here.

Regular E-Newsletters

Having built a wide contact base, e-Newsletters are an excellent way for Home Managers to distribute news about the home on a regular basis to our residents’ friends, families and healthcare professionals, keeping them informed.