Activities at Westergate House Care Home

Today we took part in another one of Barchester’s fantastic Virtual Live Events, ‘Chocolate, Chocolate, Everywhere’. This showed us the process of making chocolate from the Harrogate Chocolate Factory. This was followed with a live Q&A with some of the amazing chocolatiers. During the Live Event, we had scrumptious chocolate fondue fountains running in both our House and Memory Lane communities. Both cascading their gooey melted chocolate for everyone to enjoy. To add to these we had a selection of marshmallows, beautiful strawberries and some deliciously naughty mini donuts too! Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the treats we had here and of course the Live tour of the factory.

It’s a very Happy Easter from everyone here at Westergate House.

Our ‘Easter Bunny Hunt’ proved to be as popular as ever this year for our residents, their families and friends this Easter Bank Holiday weekend.

An incredible 33 children and over 40 adults together participated, together with our wonderful residents and staff team who all went hunting for the 12 Bunnies that were hidden around our home and over the road in award winning Denmans Garden. A former home and garden of the late John Brooks MBE, one of Britons most influential landscape gardeners; and happens to be a stone’s throw from our entrance!

A total of 16 teams took part and were on the hunt for our 12 hidden Easter Eggs, everyone did extremely well and thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon. A wonderful afternoon in the sun with refreshments and treats galore as well - what an amazing start to the Bank Holiday Easter weekend!

We took full advantage of the extra day in February, celebrating the leap year with a pampering session for of our residents. In the morning we had exercise classes throughout the home which got everyone motivated and full of energy for the day. In the afternoon we welcomed a new singer, who performed a brilliant afternoon’s cabaret in one of our Memory Lane Communities with residents and entire staff team dancing away. We are entering March in full swing here and we look forward to the fun and laughter in the month ahead.

Barchester Healthcare host company-wide ‘Live Virtual Event’s’ on a regular basis for everyone to participate and get involved in, seeing experts in their field talk about times in history, specific events or even guided tours through locations in the UK. These events are so informative and very well produced to provide the right amount of information and visual understanding for our residents. This week, we took part in the Barchester Live Event of Bingo Bonanza!! Our residents at Westergate House went head to head with over 250 Barchester Homes across the country to see who would be winners. Unfortunately we didn’t have any winners through the main games here at Westergate House although we did play on till we had a Full House and our winner who received a lovely box of chocolates. Great fun was had by all and we look forward to what the next virtual event.

Another fun packed busy week here at Westergate House, full of creativity, exercise and fun to stimulate the mind and energise the body.

We continue our wonderful ‘Doodling Workshop’ with the lovely Catherine, a daughter of one of our residents, who helped resident’s in the House community go wild and create anything they wanted on slate hearts and wooden discs, the results were amazing. Meanwhile, in our Memory Lane community, we were busy making some lovely flower arrangements, creating centre pieces for our dining tables as well as displays on cards. We saw the amazing Mitchell Armstrong entertaining us, raising the roof with some fantastic sing-along classics. There has also been some healthy competition between residents and carers during our games afternoon with Table Tennis, Darts and Giant Snakes and Ladders.

Here at Westergate we pride ourselves on our ‘dining experience’; and want to give a big shout out to our Head Chef Chris and his amazing team in the kitchen.

Not only do they produce excellent tasty three course meals throughout the day, including a bitesize menu and stunning nutritious beverage trolleys for our residents, we also cater for a host of special events each month. This month included a number of special lunches for resident’s and their families, waited on in our bistro and a ‘life celebration’, for 30 guests; you can see from the pictures that the culinary delights were simply stunning.

All that hard work going on behind the scenes just shows the care and quality of service that comes from every department and team member here at Westergate House.