We place the rights of residents at the forefront of our philosophy of care. We seek to advance these rights in all aspects of the environment and the services we provide and to encourage our residents to exercise their rights to the full.

We recognise that life in a communal setting and the need to accept help with personal tasks are inherently invasive of a resident’s ability to enjoy the pleasure of being alone and undisturbed. We, therefore, strive to retain as much privacy as possible for our service users in the following ways:

• Giving help in intimate situations as discreetly as possible.
• Helping residents to furnish and equip their rooms in their own style and to use them as much as they wish for leisure, meals and entertaining.
• Offering a range of locations around the home for residents to be alone or with selected others.
• Providing locks on residents’ storage space, bedrooms and other rooms in which residents need at times to be interrupted.
• Guaranteeing residents’ privacy when using the telephone, opening and reading post and communicating with friends, relatives or advisors.
• Ensuring the confidentiality of information the home holds about residents.

Disabilities quickly undermine dignity, so we try to preserve respect for our service users’ intrinsic value in the following ways.

• Treating each resident as a special and valued individual.
• Helping residents to present themselves to others, as they would wish through their own clothing, their personal appearance and their behaviour in public.
• Offering a range of activities, which enables each resident to express himself or herself as a unique individual.
• Tackling the stigma from which our residents may suffer through age, disability or status.
• Compensating for the effects of disabilities which residents may experience on their communication, physical functioning, mobility or appearance.

Many residents have sought admission to the home as an escape from elements in their previous living arrangements, which threatened their safety or caused them fear. We, therefore, aim to provide an environment and structure of support, which responds to this need in the following ways:

• Offering assistance with tasks and in situations, which would otherwise be perilous for residents.
• Avoiding as far as possible the dangers especially common among older people, notably the risk of falling.
• Protecting residents from all forms of abuse and from all possible abusers.
• Providing readily accessible channels for dealing with complaints by residents.
• Creating an atmosphere in the home which residents experience as open, positive and inclusive.

Being old, having disabilities and residing in a home can all act to deprive our service users of their rights as citizens. We, therefore, work to maintain our residents place in society as fully participating and benefiting citizens in the following ways:

• Ensuring that residents have the opportunity to vote in elections and to brief themselves fully on the democratic options.
• Preserving for residents full and equal access to all elements of the National Health Service.
• Helping residents to claim all appropriate welfare benefits and social services.
• Assisting residents’ access to public services such as libraries, further education and lifelong learning.
• Facilitating residents in contributing to society through volunteering, helping each other and taking on roles involving responsibility within and beyond the home.

We are aware that our residents have given up a good deal of their independence in entering a group living situation. We regard it as all the more important to foster our residents remaining opportunities to think and act without reference to another person in the following ways:

• Providing as tactfully as possible human or technical assistance when it is needed.
• Maximizing the abilities our residents retain for self-care, for independent interaction with others, and for carrying out the tasks of daily living unaided.
• Helping residents take reasonable and fully thought-out risks.
• Promoting possibilities for residents to establish and retain contacts beyond the home.
• Using any form of restraint on residents only in situations of urgency when it is essential for their own safety or the safety or others.
• Encouraging residents to have access to and contribute to the records of their own care.

We aim to help residents exercise the opportunity to select from a range of options in all aspects of their lives in the following ways:

• Providing meals which enable residents as far as possible to decide for themselves where, when, and with whom they consume food and drink of their choice.
• Offering residents a wide range of leisure activities from which to choose.
• Enabling residents to manage their own time and not be dictated to by set communal timetables.
• Avoiding wherever possible treating residents as a homogeneous group.
• Respecting individual, unusual or eccentric behaviour in residents.
• Retaining maximum flexibility in the routines of the daily life of the home.