Avery embraces digital technology for its residents
Avery Lodge in Grantham has recently helped to pioneer a new digital platform called Finderday.com that has been developed to assist elderly people in accessing the kind of communication services on-line that most of us take for granted. Under the stewardship of Helen Brown, our Recreation and Leisure Co-ordinator at Avery Lodge, we have seen first-hand the impact for both residents and family that manifest when these two groups are connected on-line.
Finderday.com was developed by Lilla Harris, who has herself managed a care home and understands more than most, the sizeable benefits of being able to connect residents to friends and family through the internet, using a simplified web interface that has been designed with accessibility to the elderly in mind. Finerday.com enables our elderly residents to connect with those that matter most, friends and family who, for a variety of reasons, are not able to visit as often as they would like to.
Digital technologies are not commonplace within care homes, leaving residents excluded from the critical services that the web has to offer and, perhaps, more importantly to the regular communication that a platform such as Finerday.com is able to provide. Paradoxically, it is the elderly who have the most to gain from being able to connect to the web and yet this group are perhaps the least able to utilise these services. Digital technologies have not permeated the vast majority of care homes but Avery has undertaken to introduce such services into all its homes and has installed wireless broadband across its portfolio of 30 homes. Computers have been installed into every Avery lounge, and communal televisions have been turned into browsers through the use of simple ‘plug in’ technologies. These have turned ‘surfing sessions’ into communal, shared activities, and has helped encourage other residents to join in the programme and further open up our care homes to family and friends. Finerday.com through its simplified interface will help take the internet to Avery’s 2200 residents many of whom have family and friends that are simply too far, or are too young to visit with any great regularity.
Aside from the hardware issues, there are obviously human resource barriers to overcome before services such as Finerday.com can be rolled out. Avery has been mindful of the training and recruitment challenges that internet tutelage brings and has worked hard to remove the reliance of such programmes on a select few of committed and web savvy ‘digital champions’. Any initiatives within care homes should not detract from the front line care that residents receive but at the same time Avery regards any programme that enhances our residents wellbeing as being of critical importance.
Go On Adopt (www.go-onadopt.co.uk), is a project running in parallel, and complementary to Finerday.com, and has sought to link care homes with local school and colleges in mentoring arrangements that will see young local people, including Scout groups and Duke of Edinburgh participants, guiding residents on-line and helping them to set up and manage their own profiles. Young people have been enthusiastic contributors, introducing the basics of emailing and photo sharing to many of our ‘early adopter’ residents. They have also guided the residents in populating their own diary, so that important dates can be shared through the site by both resident and family members alike. With reminiscence based functionality and video messaging a not too distant future prospect, the potential of Finderday.com to transform the relationships between our residents and those that matter most, is indeed enticing. Being able to upload and share their own personal story offers enormous tangible benefits to our residents, but it is the intangible value that accrues through the one to one mentoring of old and young, that represents perhaps the most exciting aspect of the programme. Family members have also be vocal in their support for the project and have commented on the benefits of being more in touch with the daily goings on at our care homes. Finderday.com has proved to be an excellent conduit to keep all our family and friends better informed.
Traditionally, care homes are not environments where innovation can readily flourish. Most homes are rightly risk averse and often led by managers for whom technology isn’t always a comfortable subject, but there are simply too many compelling reasons to engage in this kind of activity. At Avery we believe it is our duty to stimulate, inform and help our residents lead productive lives. We are committed to take the digital world into our homes and remove our reliance on a dedicated and select bunch of far sighted ‘digital champions’, opening up the benefits to all and integrating it into the daily lives of all our care homes.
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