Wind your way between suburban roads of Prestwich and the rolling hillocks of its golf club and you’ll find yourself in a village within the village. Up a leafy avenue, with its rear patio basking in the late July sunshine, Heathlands Village looks more like a European ski resort than a care home.
With origins reaching back to the 1860s, when Manchester’s Jewish community began establishing charities and homes for the community’s elderly, this purpose-built facility run by the Federation of Jewish Services can now accommodate more than 100 people in residential, nursing and end-of-life accommodation.
Click here to get the biggest stories straight to your inbox in our Daily Newsletter
A charity at which around 30 per cent of residents are state funded, the Fed is one of the biggest employers in the area with around 300 staff. But its impact is felt far wider than that, with around 500 volunteers carrying out vital work in the local community, reaching approximately one in seven Jewish households in Greater Manchester.
And this week it was name-checked by the new Prime Minister.
Andy Burnham called it the ‘gold standard’ of what social care could be in this country as he promised to expedite the Casey Commission into adult social care; improving pay and standards in the social care workforce; and to start cross-party talks on the issue.
Speaking at Jewish Care in Golders Green on Wednesday, The MP for Ashton-in-Makerfield said that the current state of social care is ‘very bad for everybody’ and must be reformed ‘with urgency’.
He cited the many people pushed into hospitals for lack of adequate care, the subsequent strain on the NHS, and the need for integration between a national health and national care service.
“It can break people if they’re left without the support that they need,” he told his audience. “People can see everything they’ve worked for wiped out by the cost of care.”
The majority of residents at Heathlands are privately funded, with residential accommodation costing around £1,300 a week. For the around 30pc of council-funded residents, the Fed receives about £742 per week.
The charity covers the resulting shortfall. To fund the rest of what they do, it must raise £2.5 million a year.
On a sunny day, Heathlands has an airy feel. Walking in past a wood and glass-panelled reception, you are greeted by a bright foyer, dining area, and patio with tables and parasols extending towards the garden.
There is an industrial-scale kitchen serving kosher meals, a comprehensive nursing facility, a hair salon, and a synagogue.
There are mental health support groups; a mums and tots group where toddlers sing with residents; a nursery; animal visits; day trips; a music and art therapist; sports days, bingo games and dance nights.
No dingy corridors, faint smell of bodily functions or miserable-looking residents – the abiding stereotype of many care homes, state-funded or private equity alike – it’s a far cry from your typical facility. What is it that makes Heathlands different?
One of the main issues Burnham highlighted was the practice of 15-minute care visits practiced by many councils across the country. “That’s all that councils say they can afford for many people,” he said.
Fed CEO Mark Cunningham thinks the centre’s success lies partly on its 500-strong army of volunteers, who put in thousands of hours every year.
Volunteering might be doing someone’s shopping and helping to unpack it. It might be driving someone to a doctor’s appointment – or acting as an advocate in that appointment when the clinical jargon seems impenetrable.
It could be helping people access support from benefits and pensions that they didn’t even know they could. But it is often as simple as a chat and a cup of tea: the Fed’s befriending service is one of its most popular.
In the volunteer co-ordinators’ office, you get a sense of the impact. The staff work diligently, calendars and schedules pasted on every wall, headsets and keyboards at the ready, phone ringing every other minute, usually someone in need on the other end of the line.
A team of trained social workers also work from the centre, engaging with anyone from families with a disabled child to victims fleeing domestic abuse, all ages and ‘throughout the various phases and challenges of life’.
It seems like a model for what Burnham called for: preventative, person-centred care.
“Whatever their problem is, we’ll try and solve it, and if we can’t, we will signpost them elsewhere,” says Sara Ogden-Cunningham, who manages social work and community services at the centre.
“Volunteers might be helping with homework, looking after children, helping with cooking while Mum looks after a special needs child. It’s really flexible and very bespoke.”
Inquiries and referrals come in every day from Greater Manchester and beyond in what Sara describes as a ‘very challenging’ but ‘very, very rewarding’ job.
“We get to think holistically and creatively,” she says. “We might go into a four-generation family, it might be a child with special needs or an older parent. We have a lot of those sandwich generations…it’s not really a sandwich, it’s a club.”
But some of the calls are distressing. “We are going into the worst,” she reflects. “Last year we visited a lady who was fleeing domestic abuse. She and her child were living in a house where there was literally no furniture and no bed.”
Raphi Bloom, who is director of fundraising, marketing and communications at the centre, recalls the first visit he went on with Sara. “I walked into the house and the smell of damp stayed on my clothes the rest of the day.
“There is a stereotype that the Jewish community is all affluent and doesn’t need support – that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The doors were hanging off, they had no food. She had sold all her jewellery and ornaments, and were making do with just a microwave and about £10 a week.
“She was the same age as my mum and she was so dignified but having to pawn her jewellery on Cheetham Hill Road.”
The Fed helped the couple with a new fridge and helped them to claim their state pension and some disability benefits – a complex system that many older people, or those unfamiliar with the internet, struggle with.
“£100 a week on Universal Credit might not sound like a lot, but if you haven’t got it, it’s a fortune,” says CEO Mark. He became a social worker in 1996, which means he has had a front row seat to the more than twenty social care reviews undertaken in the last three decades.
In his speech on Wednesday Burnham called the lack of action a ‘major dereliction of public duty’ – something Mark agrees with.
“It gets kicked into the long grass all the time…it’s a travesty that Parliament hasn’t grasped this nettle. It’s unpopular, nobody wants to pay for it.”
Burnham has acknowledged the challenge of funding and that many can lose ‘everything they’ve worked for’ through paying for care.
“You can have as many headlines as you like about this tax or that, but when people are losing hundreds of thousands of pounds, everything they’ve worked for, well, what about them?” Burnham said.
“Unless we all take some responsibility, it’s just going to carry on,” says Mark. “We will all need social care at some point – we’re going to have to pay for it one way or another.”
And Mark agreed with the Prime Minister that the way to fix the NHS was by fixing social care – and that hospital was ‘the worst place’ for the elderly to end up.
Burnham cited that the number of over-65s going to A&E had doubled to almost six million a year since 2010. “People end up in hospital needlessly and once you are, you’re on a pathway and it’s really difficult to get off,” Mark said.
“A volunteer might notice someone is not well and refer them to a GP. They might discover a mild infection which, if left unchecked, could have led to hospitalisation and then the pattern of decline.
“I think there has to be a holistic, preventative approach to this, and a recognition that some of the solution lies in the community and not hospital wards.
“Social care doesn’t have to be over-elaborate – it’s about connections and community and doing the basics well. People are generally proud and dignified, they don’t want much intervention but just some support.”
Whether that’s an ice-cream van in the garden, trips out, animal visits, or music therapy, Heathlands is about ‘adding fun back into people’s lives,’ says Mark. “There’s a statistic that says 80% of people that go into a care home and don’t go outside again…not here.”
Those who do come to live at the centre – Heathlands’ ethos is all about keeping people at home for as long as possible – are trending older, with the average age now 91, and several residents ‘in the hundreds’.
Saul Levy, 95, came to Heathlands three years ago after a brain haemorrhage meant he could no longer live on his own. He lives in one of the supported living flats – but says he ‘hardly ever’ uses the extra help dressing or showering.
“It’s done me the world of good, it’s given me another lease of life, truthfully. You can do exactly what you want, go to any activities you like.
“I get up when I like, shower myself, dress myself, go for breakfast. It keeps me independent.”
Gerda Rothberg celebrated her 100th birthday a few months ago. She is proud to still be washing and dressing herself – and holding court as Heathlands’ Queen of Rummy.
“No-one can beat her,” smiles volunteer Amanda Harris, who is visiting. “It’s very relaxing here,” Gerda says.
She came to Britain just before the war with her two sisters from East Prussia. Her story of escape on Kindertransport is enshrined in the Fed’s My Voice project, which documents the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees.
“It’s something I wanted to do for the generations to come, for the people who say the Holocaust never happened,” she says baldly. “It did happen, it’s a fact, it’s there in black and white.”
Heathlands received an influx of messages after the synagogue attack in Heaton Park last year, says Sara. “People who had never come through our doors began approaching us, saying they had previously been Jewish ‘in name only’.
“After the attack, they were scared and wanted to re-engage with their community.”
“They wanted to be together with other Jewish people, to feel solidarity, a sense of security and identity,” agrees Raphi.
The centre does serve non-Jewish people, but with its synagogue, Kosher catering and celebrations of Jewish festivals, it is ideal for those who ‘wish to see out their days in a warm, loving, state of the art Jewish environment’. Staff are often there for people in their last moments.
“We often have a lot of clients that have no family and we arrange burials,” Raphi says. “We arrange a gravestone and a commemoration service, and often, it’s just our staff that are standing around the grave when this person takes their final journey on Earth.
“We all feel that is a real privilege. When Andy talks about his father, and how carers can bring a lucid moment out of him where he can’t, he genuinely means what he says. It’s personal to him.”
Mark is confident that Heathlands’ success can be replicated elsewhere – with a strong voluntary sector, he adds.
“We think we’ve got a really good model for social care and we’re cautiously optimistic about the future – that we can improve the system we work within.”
You must be logged in to post a comment Login