Understanding care culture is crucial to successful outside space design that creates enduring and meaningful engagement with this important part of a care home’s environment, writes Debbie Carroll and Mark Rendell.
When creating a new care home garden designers need to capture the needs and wishes of the settings - often via a wish list that, along with wider physical site data, forms the foundation of our client brief. Additional focus groups with the home's residents and staff may also take place to aid an understanding of the rationale behind this list.
And yet, we can predict that there will be a key piece of information missing from the wish list, and therefore the client brief, that neither the designer nor the care home participants would have included, which covers the organisation's own care culture, and how it informs attitudes and practices relating to the current outside space.
Our research found an understanding of care culture is crucially important to successful garden design as it directly influences the activity and meaningful engagement levels with it long after the designer has left.
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