In 2013 I conducted a research project, along with fellow garden designer Mark Rendell, into "Why aren't care home gardens more actively used?", particularly for dementia, and even when they meet the latest guidance. Through our quite extraordinary journey, where our world was changed as designers by the power of a bunch of buttercups and dandelions, we discovered that the care home’s culture plays a key role in how well their residents can use their outside spaces.
We are keen to share our findings to benefit both the design and care sector in working more effectively together. We have now written for a wide range of publications and so you may find the various articles on http://www.stepchange-design.co.uk/downloads helpful for yourself in supporting care clients but also to share with Care setting themselves.
Designers and landscapers may find the articles we wrote for ‘The Horticulturalist’ or ‘The Care Home Environment’ magazines a good over view of what we did, what we found out and what this means in supporting care settings effectively. For the Care homes the article in ‘The Journal for Dementia Care’ maybe more useful.
Two articles in the National Activity Providers Association (NAPA) ‘Living life’ magazine contain some practical checklists and tools to support Activity co-ordinators and care staff in helping to engage with the outside more.
We were driven by the desire to understand why gardens in care settings often went onto become unused, even when they met the latest guidance. We had to get past what turned out to be myths about it being about having more staff or more money and so our findings support how we can deliver our designs to ensure we value for money, delivering appropriate support and that Residents can go onto be able to use the garden as and when they choose as a part of their lives in care.
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Sorry to hear about your relative and your observations are likely to be correct. There is already much information on going outside being beneficial and two reports, not by us, bring this together, while focused on dementia they apply more broadly. Look up 'Greening dementia' and most recently Dementia Adventures 'Is it nice outside'. Some of the evidence is decades old and yet care settings still were not active outside and a new garden didn't always lead to increase it either. This was where we chose to focus our research on, to understand why and what stops them going out. Feel free to share the downloads with the care setting and we'd happily chat to them if they have specific questions. We have so many stories where we witnessed the benefit of going out on individuals though this was not directly what our study set out to capture. Ultimately the care setting working in a more peron-centred way will directly increase engagement, though many claim this is the care they practice if wishes to go out are ignored they clearly are not.