IDEAL CAREHOMES HONOURS HEROIC TEAM AT ANNUAL AWARDS

Team members from Ideal Carehomes are celebrating after being recognised for their hard work and dedication at the groups’ prestigious annual award ceremony.

The Ideal Care Awards seeks to celebrate the care teams commitment and dedication to making their homes such wonderfully welcoming and caring places for their residents to live. After a callout for nominations, the group received a record breaking 1200 entries, across 14 categories ranging from Pandemic Hero, Beyond the Call of Duty, Home Manager and Care Home of the Year.

A judging day determined the finalists for each category, and a special ‘Wonka’ chocolate bar was then sent in the post, with each bar containing their golden ticket admission to the awards ceremony.

The glitzy ‘dress to impress’ glitzy awards gala, held at Casa Hotel in Chesterfield, after being cancelled several times throughout the year, where the finalist were joined by special guest and host, Shaun Williamson, best known for his role as Barry Evans in EastEnders.

Shaun entertained the finalists with stand-up comedy and impressive singing, which had everybody up on their feet, before announcing each category winner, he said, ‘It was a true honour to have been asked to join the Ideal Carehomes’ teams at the Ideal Care Awards. The stories of each finalist were incredibly moving, and it made each award I handed over all the more touching. Congratulations to all of the winners, you are all such a deserving bunch of people!’.

A special category was created with residents in mind, giving credit to those residents who are the life and soul of their homes, joining in wherever possible with whatever is going on in their home.

On the evening, each resident finalist celebrated with a party, using Facetime to join the rest of the finalists during their category. Resident Outstanding contribution winner, Frank Cavander fromBowbridge Court, said, ‘It is a real honour to even be nominated, but to win is very special. I always like to be involved with activities and I like to make myself useful and pitch in where I can to help the staff too – They are my family and Bowbridge Court is my home, I wouldn’t have it any other way!’.

Head of Development and Engagement for Ideal Carehomes, Sarah Colling, said, ‘We hosted the first Ideal Care Awards in 2019 and the response was phenomenal and surpassed even our expectations -We just knew we had to make it an annual event! This years awards focused on honouring our teams who have worked so hard on the frontline of the pandemic to continue to provide the highest standards of care. Over the past 18 months we have really seen remarkable acts of care, support and even bravery from our staff and our awards ceremony really is our chance to show our appreciation for that!’.

Managing Director, Stacey Linn, ‘Our motto for the awards is ‘not all heroes wear capes’ and that is certainly true of the Ideal Carehomes family. We had the really difficult job to narrow down our finalists, as each nomination was filled with such heart-warming stories from our homes. However, I think our finalists really stood out and were extremely deserving of the highest praise.

We are incredibly proud of all our homes and their amazing teams who work so hard to give our residents the best quality of life, and the Ideal Care Awards is just one way we ensure that they get the recognition that they deserve. Congratulations to all of our 2021 winners!’.