Our stories

Peace of mind

Moving into a care home made easy

Our care team are here to make sure that making the move is as easy as possible for you and your loved one. If you still need reassurance, here are some stories from our residents, their families and our care team.

The residents loved listening to music with a cuppa and being pampered from nails to make up in there very own beauty salon here at the Moors Care Centre. We have lots of activities on during the week but sometimes we just enjoy some 1-1 time together having our nails done or a pamper for t

Beauty Salon at The Moors

We had a fabulous day celebrating the care awards with our residents. We were delighted to win Best New Comer for our fabulous Home Manager Angela Galloway and Administrator of the year for our Admin Michael Lawrence.

Care Award Celebrations at Willowbank

On Friday 19th October we were delighted to be presented with second prize from Great Aycliffe town council for best community garden. We were absolutely over the moon to receive this award.

2nd Place For Best Community Garden

We had such a lovely afternoon watching the care awards and cheering for the nominated staff across the homes and we enjoyed a lovely buffet of the residents favourite foods.

Care Awards at Garden Hill

We enjoyed celebrating the Annual MMCG and Countrywide Care Awards in September at the home. We were joined by our wonderful residents enjoying themselves with some cocktails and we were all keeping our fingers crossed for Jodie to win the award of Activities Coordinator of the Year.

Care Awards at White Rose Lodge

Our latest fundraising event was held at Strawberry Fields Car boot where Activities Coordinators, Jodie and Manda, were selling staff donations to local bargain hunters. We had a great result from our sale in the summer, so we were hoping the weather would stay bright and dry this time around.

Car Boot Fundraising

Our home baking club activity in the home is always really popular and this month was no exception when we made home made chocolate buns. Our residents do all of the work and then our Chef at the home pops them in the oven for us. We always make extra to share with all of the resident

Home Baking Club

The residents at Willowbank had great fun at our Halloween party today. Thank you to our chefs David and Mario for the delicious food.

Halloween Party at Willowbank

We love having seasonal displays in Reception at The Moors and we are delighted to present our Harvest Festival display for Autumn. Our receptionist Tricia excels at creating these wonderful displays for the residents, staff and relatives to enjoy in the coffee shop. We hope you enjoy

Harvest Festival Display

We celebrated Bill's 100th Birthday at the home in October, with lots of fizz and laughter. Bill was delighted to receive a very special letter from the Queen. We hope you had the most wonderful birthday with us at The Moors.

Bill's 100th Birthday

There has been plenty of activity at Oaklands this month. We have had a Paper pumpkin making with a Royal Family quiz. Pumpkin painting and making pumpkin faces with stickers. Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin carving with a group singalong.

Halloween Preparation at Oaklands

Doing the things that we love the most. Thank you to Lugar bowling club for helping us support our residents to keep involved. Over seventy years membership between them and a few championship titles. New memories were made and time spent remembering the good old times.

Lugar Bowling Club

We celebrated the MMCG and Countrywide 7th annual care awards in September and were delighted when Glennie House was a winner. Our very own night shift carer Kimberly McCracken, won Carer of the year 2021. So unbelievably proud to have her as part of our team. Well done Kimberly.

Care Awards Winner

We got into the Halloween spirit during arts and crafts at the home in October and created our own ghouls. We think we did a really good job of them and the concentration during arts and crafts was intense.

Halloween Arts and Crafts

We had a lovely afternoon being entertained by Mike Wild as Elvis outside of the home in October. Our residents sat in the reception area of the home and Elvis performed for us in our patio garden. There was lots of singing and we enjoyed some fresh cream cakes and tea.

Elvis Performance

We have been making the most of the last of the sunshine in the garden in October and we had ice cream and a visit from the neighbours cat. Brenda enjoyed the feeling of grass on her feet. Fair well summer, hello to a new season with lots of fun planned.

October Sunshine

We celebrated National Mad Hatters Day in October with tea and cakes and made jam tarts the day before Mad Hatters Day. It was also Thomasina's 101st birthday so it was a double celebration at the home on 8th October for us.

Mad Hatters Day

The winter days are fast approaching and we haven’t been out in the gardens as much this month but that doesn’t stop us having fun in the home. We created our own table tennis table in the dining room and challenged each other to a competition. There were lots of laughter ringing out

We have received a lovely donation of fiddle muffs hand made by a local lady who kindly made us a variety of these for our home. Our residents loved them and we were so grateful for the donation.

Donation of Fiddle Muffs

Old Hallows Eve is fast approaching this month and as always the wonderful residents at Field View are getting prepared and making decorations to display around the home ready for our Halloween party. We have lots of spooky surprises in store.

Halloween Preparation at Field View

James, one of our residents at Earsdon Grange was over the moon when he walked his daughter down the aisle in October. He enjoyed spending the day at the wedding and came back to the home with lots of smiles and stories about the day. We think his daughter just looked absolutely beaut

We have had quite a few birthday celebrations in the home this month and Chef Moira never lets us down with her home baked cakes. We love home baking at the home and spend many an afternoon with Moira creating biscuits and cakes for coffee mornings at the home. We can’t wait to be abl

Cakes at Earsdon

The winter days are fast approaching and we haven’t been out in the gardens as much this month but that doesn’t stop us having fun in the home. Pat organised to have a dominoes competition in the coffee shop with residents and carers.

The people living and working at Woodlands care home went all out for Halloween. Not only were the traditional scary faces carved into the pumpkins there were glittery cats and spiders and some beautifully decorated smaller pumpkins and squashes.

A fantastic display.

Halloween at Woodlands

In preparation for our Halloween Party and to celebrate National Pumpkin Day, our talented staffs and residents started doing the giant pumpkin carving. Amber Court’s Resident did the sketching, then the staff doing the carving after. It is a team effort after all.

Pumpkin Carving at Amber Court

Always a welcome addition to the day, our residents love Cheese and Biscuits.

Cheese and Biscuits

When we announced that we will be having a Halloween party in Amber Court, our residents and staff were very excited for it. We started preparing for the event through organizing a small activity with the residents and staff by carving pumpkins and making decorations.

Amber Court's Halloween Preparation

We had lots of memories whilst sampling food and drink from the Agean . It was a lovely afternoon enjoyed by all.

Greek Afternoon

Here at Abbey View we really like to get into the Halloween spirit.

Halloween at Abbey View

Look how we turned these into a little mummy doll. Joan, one of our residents, really enjoyed doing this with her fellow residents and staff.

Artworks For Halloween

The people living at The Hawthorns decorated small pumpkins with a selection of flowers for a beautiful centre piece. They thoroughly enjoyed picking the flowers and placing them in the selected place. It was a lovely morning with everyone encouraging each other’s work, giggling and smiling.

Flower Power Pumpkins

We have been decorating around the home and Deepdene is very lucky to have staff team members with many skills like Adrian helping to put these beautiful vases on the flowers shop.

Decorating Deepdene

As Halloween approaches we started to make some Halloween fun crafts, like these beautiful little bats and pumpkins filled with sweets for our residents to enjoy.

Art and crafts at Deepdene

We had a lovely afternoon In Deepdene, enjoying an afternoon of a Halloween themed sing along with Helen .

Halloween Themed Sing Along

The people loving at Woodlands have been busy creating various items to decorate our lounge for the harvest season and Halloween. They have enjoyed using different techniques and textures and the results are fantastic.

Harvest Festival and Halloween

Tea and Cake day went down a treat! We enjoyed some lovely cakes with a cup of tea in our best china tea service. There was also some mindful colouring and a tea quiz to find out how much we know about the origin of tea itself.

Tea and Cake Day

There was some fantastic artistic flair exhibited at The Hawthorns. People living at the home used watercolours and painted objects from their rooms, while others used charcoal to sketch buildings and structures. Superb work all round!!

Art at The Hawthorns

To raise awareness for Breast Cancer Awareness Month recently, the residents decorated some beautiful cupcakes and made unique pink ribbon badges.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

The Christmas cake competition has begun!

Right across our 3 floors, residents have been battling it out to bake the best festive cake.

Christmas Cake Competition

Sadly we have had to say goodbye to Angela who retired on the 16th September 2021. Angela has been a huge part of Belvoir Vale for so many years and we will all miss her although she has kindly agreed to return and visit us each Sunday when the Church service take place.

Amber Court team had a great idea to turn our Oscar Awards Statue into scary mummy. We used tissue rolls to cover and draw some bloods in it. Look how amazing and scary it is. Our residents and staff in Amber Court can’t wait for our Halloween Party!

Amber Court's Scary Mummy

An afternoon of apple cider and apple pie in celebration of World Apple Day here at Ashfield!

World Apple Day

One of our resident's relative sent us a lovely flowers and wrote a thank you card for everyone. This means a lot to us! We are very happy to serve and care.

Thank You Flowers and Cards.

Ashfield Court really enjoyed a game of scrabble before lunch last week.

Wyndham Hall were very generously gifted £2,500 for some art work within the home and after much deliberation we opted for Charlotte Designs and artist Sarah Hodgkins produced this beautiful mural in an open area on our specialist dementia wing.

Room with a View

September 24th the sun was shining as it was Macmillan Cancer Support Fundraiser Coffee Afternoon.

We had a fabulous raffle with gifts donated by River View and local businesses – thank you. Thank you to everyone who took part. We raised a cracking £152.00.

Macmillan Fundraiser at River View

Today we went fossil crazy. As well as watching the online opening of the Norwich Cathedral Diplodocus 'Dippy' Exhibition, we learnt plenty of interesting fossil facts, played a Fossil Day word game and also coloured-in pictures of ancient sea fossils.

National Fossil Day!

An arts and crafts session painting some rainbow hand autumn trees. Everyone living in the home who joined in with this session really enjoyed comparing the size of their hands, along with everyone’s unique shape🍁🌳

Art Day at Wyndham

Making these were great fun and we created a lot of mess. So cheap and simple to do. We purchased magnetic strips from a local craft shop. These make lovely gifts which we will be gifting to family and friends.

Salt Dough Magnets

What a lovely relaxing afternoon our residents had creating such wonderful pictures.

It may be raining outside, but the sun is always shining in Buckingham House.

Arts and Crafts Afternoon