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Cedar House Festive Bake Off!
In December, Cedar held its first Christmas cake decorating competition. One of our chefs made all the wards a Christmas cake and the patients were asked to decorate them. We had some fantastic entries and the judges had a very hard time deciding the winner, but a winner...
Welcome to Maddie!
We’ve recently welcomed our new pet rabbit Maddie to the centre – she is 3 months old and her breed is a Dutch mix. As a therapeutic pet for our Residents we hope to have small sessions each day where they can hold her and pet her and...
Banking time at Eldertree Lodge
Eldertree Lodge has a patient forum called Noise, voice, choice. Patients used this forum to request that a wider range of activities be available on-site. Members of staff were quick to volunteer their talents and time and now, each month members of staff volunteer an hour of their...
Music at Cedar House
Cedar House now boasts its own music room in a dedicated building with a range of instruments; drums, keyboards, guitars, bongos and even DJ decks. We also have our own music lead, professional musician, Douglas Mukuze, who ensures that patients can progress and develop their musical abilities. There...
Huntercombe Stafford rated “outstanding” for being caring
Patients told the CQC inspectors that they were happy and safe; they were satisfied they were getting the right support for their problems and had seen progress in themselves. They said they would recommend other people to be treated at the hospital. Our hospital, at Ivetsey Bank, Wheaton...
Using exercise to promote health and wellbeing at Conifer Lodge
At Conifer Lodge we have been encouraging our residents to be fitter and healthier, so we’ve started doing a group evening walk after dinner. To celebrate Mental Health Day, our group of walkers decided to walk a little further to take in some more of the countryside and...
Mersea Island Festival – enabling Cedar house patients to shine
The Cedar House team have been taking patients to the Festival for the past five years and are huge advocates of all that it does for our patients. Historically we’ve only taken a small group of around three patients but this year we were able to take six...
Reasons to stay: Huntercombe’s Nurse Leadership Programme
Healthcare organisations in the public and private sectors have responded by launching initiatives to develop their own nursing pools through alternative channels of education and training (see the ‘Grow your own nurses’ article on this site). The problem, though, goes beyond persuading nursing candidates to commit to a...
Growing your own Mental Health Nurses
Managing mental health issues and learning disabilities requires multidisciplinary input, and nurses are an invaluable part of that team. They are at the front line of delivering strategies to address challenging behaviour and help inpatients towards fulfilled, integrated lives back in the community. Mental-health nurses also provide the...
Cedar House Education and Therapy Department
From the point of admission, we are focused on the skills an individual needs to develop and how to assist them in preparing for discharge or the next stage of their journey. In order to achieve these goals the Education and Therapy department employ a qualified teacher, along with...
Fishing as therapy?
The Cedar House Fishing Group has been running for over five years and, as it turns out, it’s a bit of a family affair. Paul Wilmshurst took it over from his brother who, along with their mum, all work for Huntercombe. Paul is clearly a passionate fisherman but...
Transforming Care in Practice: Eldertree Lodge
Magnifying these challenges, and the need for radically revised care strategies in the sector, were the significant reductions of in-patient capacity mandated by Building the right support, the NHS commissioning plan published in October 2015[1]. This document outlined a national service model to ensure that Transforming Care delivered...
Next stage of development for Brain in Hand at Cedar House
Brain in Hand (www.braininhand.co.uk) is currently being used to help patients better self-manage in order to reduce anxiety and crisis incidents, especially when in the local community. Brain in Hand gives patients easy access to their own personalised diary, reminders, and coping strategies through an app on their...
All we want for Christmas… is a visit by a family of reindeer!
When we first started looking into the idea we didn’t even know if it was possible but funnily enough, there’s a company that are local to us that hires out reindeer for exactly our purpose. However, it’s not particularly cheap so we decided to raise funds for it...
Eldertree Lodge – a case study on Positive Behaviour Support
Meet J J’s a 55 year old woman with mild intellectual disability and emotionally unstable personality disorder who’s detained under the Mental Health Act (MHA 1983). Before she moved to Eldertree, she’d been a resident in a mental health hospital. This was after a breakdown of numerous community...
Cedar House Summer Fete
The original idea for a summer fete came from a patient (as many of our best ideas do!). Frustrated that they were unable to get out and about to any of the local summer fetes, we decided to bring the fete to them! And the rest, as they...
Understanding the difference between mental health issues and learning disabilities
Yet understanding exactly what the issue is marks the first step towards personalised treatment strategies that recognise the enormous complexity of mental illness and the uniqueness of every patient. The same goes for learning disabilities, an area that shares certain characteristics, such as, channels for diagnosis and management,...
Jill Dawson wins PBS BILD Coach of the Year
Congratulations to Jill Dawson, Lead Speech and Language Therapist at the Huntercombe Group, who received the award for PBS (Positive Behaviour Support) Coach of the Year at the 2018 BILD PBS Leadership Awards which took place during their International Conference in May 2018. To read more about Positive...
Join us on 16th June for an information day on Alzheimer’s
The day features three free interactive information sessions where our visitors can learn all about how dementia affects a person and what you can do to make a difference. With an estimated 850,000 people in the UK living with dementia and 24.6 million – 38% of the UK...
Moorpark Place celebrates Mental Health Awareness Week
Moorpark Place staff raised awareness of stress for Mental Health Awareness Week 2018, by carrying out a CPD session for staff. The session focussed on the need for being aware of stress and coping strategies for managing time, and organisation which when mismanaged can create a feeling of...
Managing challenging behaviour with Positive Behaviour Support
When thinking about the causes of challenging behaviours, it is important to consider the environment and wider context in which the behaviour occurs as well as the person’s own internal factors such as physical and emotional well-being, mental health and cognitive abilities. As often as not, they are...
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: Building a Life Worth Living
In fact, these efforts may prove counterproductive if people feel invalidated by too strong an emphasis on the need to change. They have to come to terms with their problematic behaviour, and know it is understood and accepted as a means of coping with challenging circumstances, before they...
