#PostcardsOfKindness
Last year, Your Health Ltd, a nursing and residential care home provider, launched a #PostcardsOfKindness campaign, asking holidaymakers across the UK and overseas to send postcards to their elderly residents to help combat loneliness and isolation.
On 13 July, Cedar Court Dementia Care Home in Burton-on-Trent, posted the initial calls for postcards on Facebook. Since then, their residents have been inundated with postcards, from across the UK and further afield. Now they’re hoping to take their appeal one step further by encouraging more care homes, hospices, hospitals and other care settings to get involved.
‘We want to combat loneliness and isolation across the country, and remind our residents that there's always somebody thinking of them - regardless of where in the world the postcards have come from,’ the group said on their Facebook page.
Louise Baker, Your Healthcare Ltd’s marketing assistant, said: ‘We want to inspire our residents to remember happy childhoods spent beside the sea, or times when they might have taken their own children on a foreign holiday or UK break, perhaps.
‘Postcards provide residents with a connection to the outside world and let them know that people are still thinking about them – that they remain an integral part of the community. The nostalgia and reminiscence aspect is obviously a huge one, particularly for those affected by the various stages of dementia.
‘More than anything, we wanted our residents to experience the simple pleasure associated with receiving post – especially when it’s something as jovial as a postcard. A postcard can be looked at, talked about and shared again and again, and we hope the residents will want to exercise their imaginations as they think about what different places might be like.
‘We hope that our residents will feel connected to the wider community as they begin to receive cards from people they don’t know, but who have obviously cared enough to get in touch. Loneliness is so often felt by adults and the elderly, regardless of how many people they’re surrounded by.’
Getting involved is simple. If you’re on your travels and thinking of people in care, visit the Postcards of Kindness Facebook page for details and addresses of care homes or settings that you can post to. Please feel free to pick more than one! Your words, anecdotes and holiday memories could really brighten someone's day.
