Here's what happened at our CareGiver Conference 2025

The Right at Home CareGivers Conference, held at Bartley Lodge near Lyndhurst on 12^th March 2025, was organized by Right at Home Bournemouth and Poole.  This event, thought to be the first of its kind in the UK, aimed to recognize the crucial role of care professionals and enhance their own perception of themselves as professional caregivers.

The conference included training sessions on diabetes management, dementia care, nutrition and hydration and how to support care managers in providing evidence of Outstanding practice, outstanding being the highest rating awarded by the English regulator, the Care Quality Commission rating . Attendees came from eight Right at Home offices across southern England, along with senior leaders from Diabetes UK, LuxuryCare and from Right at Home’s UK national office.

The conference was inspired by a suggestion from Marta Sorrentino, a caregiver at Right at Home Bournemouth and Poole, who proposed a special event for caregivers in 2024’s annual employee feedback survey.  Right at Home Bournemouth and Poole hope this will become an annual event and the Right at Home UK national office is already encouraging other franchise offices to arrange similar regionally focussed caregiver conferences in the future.  After Marta’s suggestion, we asked all our caregivers if they we be interested in attending and the responses included:

‘I would be interested in attending a CareGiver Conference, it would be a great way to meet others from different offices and a chance to hear about and share best practices.’

‘That sounds like a fantastic idea and I would love to be a part of it!’

‘Any topics for me will be fine. I’m sure there Is always something new to learn’

‘Talk about the importance of nutrition and hydration to maintain physical and mental health wellbeing and how it helps with things like maintaining cognitive function’

‘For me, spending time with other care workers is key and would be a huge benefit’

‘I would be really interested in learning more Dementia and the best ways to help with this with clients’

Following the overwhelmingly positive feedback, we decided to arrange our first CareGiver conference.

We were keen to include a Dementia session from a slightly different perspective, inspired by our work with a local residential care home group, Luxury Care, with whom we have built up a positive working relationship. Luxury Care deliver a different style of Dementia training, informed by the work of Doctor Gemma Jones and her bookcase analogy of dementia which we felt would be interesting for CareGivers to learn about.   We were lucky to have a former Right at Home trainer and coordinator, Ola Wilczynska, who is now the Luxurycare Group Trainer, come and explain Dr Jones’s work to us.  She was accompanied by Julie Burt, Luxury Care's Head of Care Services. More on Dr Jones’s work is available on her Wide Spectrum website https://thewidespectrum.co.uk/

Although the title might not indicate it, Ola’s top recommendation for a publication to further your knowledge of Dr Jones’s work is a book called About Dementia: for Families with Children

Some of the greatest accolades for the day came from Ola’s dementia presentation with delegates’ comments including, when asked what their highlight of the day was,

‘Dementia, the most beautiful explanation of It’

‘The Dementia session, I loved it! It was bite sized chunks that I can use in my care delivery’

‘I got a whole new understanding of what is happening to my client I care for daily. All my questions I had was answered.’

After discussing our plans for the event with our National Office, they offered to support on the day by providing speakers as well as advising on how to organise the conference itself.   This meant we had a session on CQC and maintaining an Outstanding rating which was pitched at CareGiver level so they could better understand how to support their managers to put together evidence of outstanding care.  We felt this was part of the attraction of the day to make it appeal even more to other Franchise offices and encourage them to send people.  We were fortunate to have Rachel Cullingham, Right at Home UK’s Senior Quality and Compliance Manager who happens to be the Right at Home Bournemouth and Poole compliance manager deliver this under the banner of ‘Achieving Excellent in Homecare’ with plenty of audience participation.   

Right at Home UK’s CEO, Lucy Campbell opened the conference with an inspiring and generous address charting the development of Right at Home as well as outlining her own journey as a leader in care.  She also kindly expressed her determination, shared by us as organisers, that the day should be firmly focussed on caregivers.

Further high priced help came from Simon Osborne, Right at Home UK’s Group Director of Quality and Care and Talent Attraction Manager, David O’Brien.  Simon went through Right at Home’s systems, technology and innovation agenda including Sentai, the AI companionship and monitoring system and Whzan, supplier of vital signs monitoring equipment. This was an interactive session getting the CareGivers involved and sharing the exciting upcoming new services we will be able to offer.  David covered all the potential career avenues and opportunities with his More than Care presentation, focusing on the fact that what we do is, well, ‘More than Care’.

We were also lucky enough to secure a speaker from Diabetes UK, Dave Pomfrey, who gave a comprehensive overview of the symptoms, treatment and dietary considerations for diabetes.

We also ensured we included a fluids and nutrition session to tie in with wellbeing.  This touched upon client hydration and nutrition but majored on how us as caregivers can use exercise and diet to improve our own quality of life.  We were lucky enough to have our very own Maria Ariza deliver this fun and interactive session which gave great tips on how to help ourselves during the day when we might otherwise be sat in the car or at a desk in the office.

The afternoon refreshment break saw the distribution of the tote bags for all participants. We included two Diabetes UK booklets, one on Type 1 and one on Type 2 diabetes.  There was also a Right at Home training brochure that supported David’s talk on career progression opportunities and a pair of branded Right at Home socks. Luxury Care kindly supplied donated a mug, compact shopping bag and pen for each bag.  We also chose to include a face mask, lip balm and hand cream. This was to further emphasise that today was about them, encourage self-care and general wellbeing.

Some other great feedback we had about the day included:

‘I found the fitness session informative and enjoyable, and the dementia talk was so helpful and gave me some insight that I will be using and passing on to our caregivers.’

‘Clear, concise and very meaningful.’

‘I really enjoyed the day. It’s freshened me up also value me as an integral part of an organisation.’

We were lucky enough to receive coverage of the day from both the Bournemouth Daily Echo and HomeCare Insight Magazine.