Activities at Lucerne House Care Home

We are delighted to announce that we are now live with our new digital care system, Enable.

To mark this occasion, our team celebrated their amazing efforts and teamwork with a selection of cakes made by our fantastic Head Chef, spelling out "Enable", and a special cake made by Ron, Head of our Nursing Community.

Sally Coletti, General Manager, said, "We are delighted to go live today and want to thank the team who have worked hard over the past few weeks preparing the system and our residents' care plans."

Our new system, "Enable", is an e-care system that supports documentation at the point of care electronically, not only saving paper but also allowing more time to spend with our residents.

Here's to the future at Lucerne, with Enable and our digital success.

We are delighted to gather each week at Chatterbox Café with our community, where our homemade cakes are always popular – there wasn't a single slice left this time! It's a lovely way to spend a morning, and we're grateful to be part of such a wonderful community.

During our visit to Chatterbox, we had the pleasure of catching up with Roseanna Wills, the Church and Community worker for St Michael's Alphington.

Roseanna organised a sale in support of "Begin Well Antenatal Classes" at the church, featuring table-top sales, refreshments, and a raffle. Among the various prizes, Roseanna kindly asked if we could contribute one of our nappy cakes to the raffle. We were thrilled to help and immediately began assembling our nappy cake for the event.

We hope everyone enjoyed themselves, and we trust that the recipient of our nappy cake was delighted with it.

Our home was full of sweet treats as we kicked off Doughnut Week.

We started with a doughnut and coffee morning, sampling various flavours from Krispy Kreme and even challeged ourselves to the very difficult 'try not to lick your lips while eating a doughnut' challenge. It sounded easy but it proved to be very tricky and the temptation to lick your lips once the sugar had touched them was all too much for most.

In between, we managed to squeeze in a game or two on our Rainbow table.

In the afternoon, in acknowledgement of Dementia Action Week, our Memory Lane community took part in one of their favourite activities, pizza making. It's a great way to stimulate conversation, social inclusion and creativity, all while filling the environment with the wonderful smell of fresh pizza baking which really gets the appetite going.

Our residents, visitors and team members had a great day, full of tasty food and fun, whilst making great memories together.

It was also a delight to have Matilda, daughter of Alex from our activities team, join us for the day. Matilda has been a tremendous help with all our events, and our residents were thrilled to welcome her back, sharing stories and participating in activities together.

It's music festival season and Lucerne Music Festival has been a massive success.

Residents, visitors and team members have gathered in our, transformed, Memory Lane Community for an afternoon of music, dancing, food and fun, spanning the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Team members donned their best festival gear, including our tie-dye t-shirts, made by our residents, complete with festival accessories.

The home was buzzing with energy, laughter and fun which has carried on, into the evening, with residents and visitors still commenting on how much of a great time they have had.

The activities team wish to say a massive thank you to the team, working with us today, for all their support, helping our wonderful residents to dress for the occasion and for joining in with the fun and festivities.

Lucerne may even hold "Lucerne House music festival 2" later in the summer.

For the third year running, we were delighted to have some feathered friends staying with us at Lucerne House. On Wednesday 17th April, the first of our baby ducks, broke through its shell and joined our home. Before long, four more ducklings were cuddled up together, under their brooder, ready to meet our residents, team members and visitors.

Our 5 baby ducks have been getting acquainted with residents, visitors and team members, who have all enjoyed a little snuggle and watching them thrive. We have seen them swimming in a paddling pool and they have brought such joy and warmth as we welcome the spring months to Lucerne House.

The ducks are now living on a small holding, belonging to member of our care team who will be regularly updating us with how they are getting on.

Lucerne House has a very exciting announcement to make as in April we were the first Barchester Healthcare home, in the South West, to receive The Digital Rainbow - Care Home Table. Our residents and members of our team feel truly blessed to have been given hands on training from Karl, from The Digital Rainbow, on how to use all of the amazing features including music, sensory fun, cognitive challenges, reminiscence activities and more.  We have got straight into using our amazing new equipment the very next day. We began with some different games, including, bowling, word searches, who wants to be a millionaire and more.

Then, we took it around the home where residents were able to engage with activities and apps that they enjoy. Sheila was totally taken, being able to play Sudoku in her room. In the afternoon we had planned to have our regular countdown activity, but, with the use of the Care home table, we were able to play digitally, with the ability to have numbers rounds and the "crucial" countdown conundrum. The tables final interaction was in our Memory lane community where residents were able to watch football highlights of their favourite teams on YouTube, engage in sensory activities and we even got some karaoke going which saw residents, visitors and team members all singing songs by various artists. It's only been a day and we are already totally in love with it.