New opening
‘homely’ sanctuary, with generous storage and a well-appointed en suite wet room. Residents are free to change the colour of the walls should they wish, although there are restrictions on installing their own furniture, given stringent modern fire regulations.
Memory
The first floor of Maplewood Court has been designed with dementia in mind (although Oakland prefers to use the term ‘memory’; thus, residents living with dementia are known as ‘memory residents’). Key to the interior design, and the design of Maplewood Court as a whole, was Oakland’s in-house interior designer Jacqueline Farguson. “She’s integral to the whole journey,” says Richard. “In terms of the layout of the building, to make sure that from day one it works from a CQC [Care Quality Commission] perspective but also from the residents’ perspective – whereas I’ll look at it more from the development perspective, Jacqueline will say well, I haven’t got enough space here for six residents to sit around this table when they’re doing this or that. So she’ll look at it very much from an operational, resident perspective. “So what we’ve done on the first floor,
we’ve designed it for our memory residents,” Richard continues. “We have subtle changes and differences like coloured doors on the bedrooms so they’re all painted differently to the standard colour we’ve got downstairs. The environment in terms of colour and tone and contrast is just slightly different to what it is [on the ground floor]. It’s not massively different. There’s not a huge difference in the layout of the building upstairs. It’s just more about colours and tones of colours and there’s a lot more touchy-feely things in the corridor upstairs, a lot more objects for people to have a look at. Jacqueline is very good at finding connections to the local area and so she’ll pick up on a local theme and then go and find some pictures or artefacts - or ‘nick-nacks’ as she would call them - and she’ll put them on a
table in the middle of the corridor. “It’s about creating bits of interest in that corridor as well as the journey, whether they’re going to an activity or to have dinner or breakfast or whatever it may be. So, it’s very much about the colours, the contrasts on the wallpaper, and the flooring – making sure that they match so we don’t have big changes in colour tones. For example, the corridor carpet is very similar to all the carpets in the bedrooms because people with memory issues, if there’s a very dark colour going to a light colour, they can perceive that as a step or a changing level and they’re very nervous to step over it. “Even with me the external spaces, all the
paving is generally the same colour so we don’t have any big changes in tone or colour. So it’s more about colours and tones than the actual physical shape of the building upstairs being different.”
Along the corridors on both floors are
displays created by Jacqueline to spark recollection and conversation. One display focuses on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Moonraker, which mentions Maidstone by name and takes place partly in the Kent countryside. Another display features Formula 1 books and memorabilia. And on the wall outside every room at Maplewood Court is a memory box that can be used to display photographs or other meaningful objects that residents will recognise and which should help them navigate their way around the home.
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Safety first As Maplewood Court was relatively quiet when I visited, I was able to move around fairly freely. Of course, once dozens of residents are living at the home, post- COVID infection control will be an ongoing consideration. I asked Richard whether infection control had been incorporated into the design and build itself. “The only thing we really changed is we increased the air changes per hour in the communal areas,” he says. “So it was just about moving air around. We had lots of discussions internally about putting hand wash stations and various other things through the building, but I think we took the view that COVID was a really serious issue, but a lot of it was about the individual staff in the homes and how well they managed it. So during the first phase of COVID we did really, really well, had very few issues with it.
“We changed the air, we put in some visitors’ suites in some of the other homes, [we installed] clear plastic screens with intercoms so residents still could see their family, but it was it very much a management thing – we were very, very strict in terms of how staff worked on individual floors and individual areas of buildings.” Another topical issue, and one that elicits strong views, is that of safety monitoring. Does Oakland employ CCTV inside its homes? “Within the building we’ve got no
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com September 2022
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