36 INTERVIEW BY GINNY FARRELL
Marc W
Chudley MANAGER OF THE FLEET CARE HOME
The Fleet Care Home isn’t just somewhere to live - it’s a busy, welcoming part of Dartmouth life. At the centre of it all is home manager Marc Chudley, whose winding career has taken him from genetics labs and London hospitals to the heart of South Hams care. Ginny Farrell met up with Marc to find out more about daily life at the town’s welcoming care home.
ith a strong focus on community, inclusion and enjoying life, Marc
is helping to shape a home that feels more like a neighbourhood than an institution. From coffee mornings and minibus trips to thoughtful end-of-life care, Te Fleet is proof that later life can still be full of connection and purpose. Walk into Te Fleet Care Home
on any weekday morning and the first thing you notice isn’t the care routines or the clipboards - it’s the atmosphere. Tere’s coffee on the go, residents stopping for a chat near reception, and a general sense that this is somewhere people actually live, rather than somewhere they’ve simply ended up. Tat feeling is no accident. It’s something home manager Marc Chudley is quietly determined to protect. Marc has been at Te Fleet for
nearly two years, but his route here has been anything but straightfor- ward. Born and raised in Plymouth, he grew up in Crownhill, went to John Kitto Community College, and headed off to London to study ge- netics. Back then, he fully expected to end up as a scientist in a lab. Tat didn’t quite go to plan. Aſter graduating, the 43-year-old
returned to Devon and took a job in a microbiology lab testing food for pathogens. It was steady, it was sensible - and it drove him mad. “I realised I really missed people,” he says. “It was the same tests, same faces, every day. Tere was no human connection.”
“I love the residents, I love
the team. It feels like a proper community - and that’s exactly how it should be.”
landed somewhere that felt right. Te science, the clinical side, and the people - all of it clicked. Tat combination eventually
took him back to London, this time to the Royal Marsden Hospital, where he worked as a genetic nurse supporting people with BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations. It was the dream job he’d worked towards for years, and also one of the toughest roles he’s ever done. “A lot of it was breaking really hard news,” he says. “Sometimes it was good news, but oſten it wasn’t.” Living away from home again,
Tat restlessness pushed him
towards care. He became a support worker in the community, mainly working with adults who had acquired brain injuries, and applied to do a nursing degree at Plymouth University. He didn’t get in the first time, but he did the second. From 2013 to 2016 he trained as a nurse, working in care alongside his studies, and found he’d finally
combined with the emotional weight of the work, made him reassess what he wanted. “I’d spent six years aiming for that role,” he says, “and then realised it wasn’t how I’d imagined it.” So, once again, Marc came back to Devon. He joined Dame Hannah Rogers
Trust in Ivybridge, working with young adults with complex physical disabilities. He quickly became lead nurse, then registered manager for two homes. When Covid hit, his background in science and nurs- ing suddenly became crucial. Te residents were incredibly vulnerable - many with respiratory conditions - but by acting quickly and cau-
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