Deerlands is a nice accessible building as everything’s on one floor; we don’t have stairs, there are no lifts, no barriers, it’s very light and there’s lots of access to outside spaces.

We’re in the middle of a good community and we employ local staff; the majority walk to work. We’re near the working men’s club and local shops and we’ve got good transport links. Our residents and their relatives like the locality and that were very good value for money.

Our staff are really friendly and approachable and very committed. They’re very experienced, and they have lots of local knowledge. We only take on people who are kind and caring.

We’ve got a day centre and a minibus, so the day centre team also involve our residents in activities and trips out. We’ve got a resident who loves going out on the journey to pick people up. We take our residents out shopping, Boundary Mills is a favourite; we go to The Deep, sometimes it’s very ordinary things – if we have to go to Asda to buy new glasses we’ll take some residents with us. We’ll go out to country pubs,we get involved in local activities like the Parsons Cross Forum, they do dementia support, and they put on entertainment. We also get to use the Colley Club for big parties and events.

We’ve got two activity coordinators, so they do anything from one to one nails for residents in in their own bedroom, to arts and crafts, chair exercises, and we have pony therapy, dog therapy, small animals visiting, as well as regular singers, entertainers, and magicians.

We’re proud of our good home-cooked food, the cooks go out to talk to residents to see what they’d like and what we can improve, people often love like good English food, stews, chicken pot pies, all sorts of baking and we also do curries and spicy food. When you walk into the home and smell the food cooking you think “that smells gorgeous”, it’s a proper Bisto moment!

Deerlands is a smaller building and very homely. The bedrooms are cozy and people can personalise them. We’ve got three lounges, a secure garden. We’ve got a big function room, which is really flexible and adaptable, we use that for entertainment, parties, chair exercises and church services. We  also have a bigger space in the day centre that families can use for parties etc, it has its own access and entrance, we’ve had a family hold their own 80th party there and it’s self contained.
Staff say it’s a really nice company and a nice place to work. Someone came here just to get a job as a stop gap and they’re still here ten years later.

The weekly fee for Deerlands Residential Home is £900.