Waterloo Care Home

Waterloo Care Home in Wimborne, Dorset

Waterloo Care Home is a real home for life near the lovely market town of Wimborne, in Dorset. We provide affordable residential, dementia and respite care.

Our staff have the specialist training and experience to care for people with mixed dementia, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson’s, mental health issues and historic brain injury.

As well as caring for our residents we care about their families too. Our door is always open for a chat, and our residents’ and families’ forum gives relatives a way to support each other. Family members are welcome in at any time, for a cuppa, or to join us for a meal.

Where is Waterloo Care Home?

We’re in a peaceful, leafy semi-rural spot close to Wimborne, Verwood, West Moors and Ringwood. With the A31 and A338 nearby there are excellent transport links into Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole.

Call us on 01202 070 551 to arrange a visit or an informal chat, we’d love to introduce you to the home, our staff and our residents.

Care home facilities

Waterloo is furnished and decorated to a high standard, to create a relaxed and homely environment for all our residents. Our comfortable, spacious lounge and dining rooms overlook our lovely accessible garden.

The bedrooms at Waterloo

There are 36 single bedrooms, across the ground floor and the first floor. Our first floor is fully accessible, by stairs or a lift. All our rooms have en-suites or washbasins in the room. The rooms without en-suites have accessible bathrooms nearby.

Some of our first-floor rooms have balconies, with space for a table and chairs, pots and a birdfeeder. Some of the ground-floor bedrooms have patio doors which open out onto the garden.

We encourage our residents to personalise their rooms with their own photos and furniture. Personal possessions help residents feel at home, and provide extra stimulation and time for reminiscence.

Each bedroom’s front door is a different colour and style, with its own number, door knocker and letterbox, which makes it more recognisable.

The garden at Waterloo

We’re very lucky to have a lovely three-acre garden, with a backdrop of trees beyond. It’s enclosed and safe and there’s plenty of space to sit out on the patio, or to do a bit of gardening.

There’s a big fishpond with koi carp, plus raised beds. We’ve installed birdfeeders, hedgehog houses and bug hotels to attract the local wildlife.

Visitors are welcome to use the BBQ when they come to Waterloo.

Our staff

Tammy Maidment is the registered manager of Waterloo Care Home near Wimborne.

Some examples of how our staff go the extra mile for our residents:

• Lisa, our admin assistant, is our present-buyer for Christmas and birthdays to make sure our residents have personal gifts, she does this in her own time
• Hanna, one of our senior staff attends the local Verwood Dementia Friends group and will often take residents to the gardening or woodwork classes, all in her own time.
• Staff bring their dogs (mostly labradors and pugs) in on their day off to see residents

Staff training

All our staff go on an intensive three-day Agincare induction before starting at Waterloo.

We also work with NHS in-reach dementia specialists, district nurses and the community mental health team to make sure our staff are fully-trained and our residents are cared-for.

Social activities

Our activities coordinator, Trisha, organises a wide variety of activities, so there’s something to suit everybody:

• Planting seeds for our garden
• Petting dogs, alpacas and owls
• Doing arts and crafts
• Playing Team Giant Scrabble
• Attending film nights
• Joining in exercise and yoga sessions

We love to welcome music and singing into Waterloo, from professional pianists and singers, through to local schoolchildren and Scouts, and a panto group at Christmas.

Our staff do lots of practical activities with our residents, such as pampering sessions. A hairdresser comes once a week, and we have regular chiropodist visits, too.

Being part of the local community is important to us, so the people we care for are connected, not isolated. We have people who come in and spend time chatting to our residents. And representatives from our local church visit regularly.

We are part of the Verwood Dementia Friends Association.

We also go to Sturts Community Trust once a fortnight, to work in their dementia garden and with their woodwork group. This group is particularly popular with some of our male residents, especially one man who worked for many years repairing tractors.

We’re right next to a lovely garden centre. We often take a little stroll round to their cafe and have a wander round to see what’s growing. It’s also popular with Waterloo visitors, who can easily pop next door with their family member.

Food and nutrition

Good, wholesome home-cooked food is essential at a care home. We have two chefs, who prepare a great variety of traditional and seasonal home-cooked meals.

They always ask for feedback from our residents, including through our residents’ forum, and are more than willing to adapt menus.

Our kitchen staff have received a 5* ‘Very Good’ rating from the Food Standards Agency.

Mealtimes are really important to us. We encourage our residents to eat together as there are so many social and nutritional benefits. However, people can choose to eat their meals in private too, if they prefer.

There’s a menu board in our dining room, but we always re-offer before serving, to check our residents haven’t changed their minds about what they’d like to eat.

Between meals there are always snacks and drinks available.

Call us on 01202 070 551 to arrange a visit or an informal chat, we’d love to introduce you to the home, our staff and our residents.

Response to CQC report (July 2019)

Tammy Maidment, registered manager of Waterloo Care Home

Tammy is responsible for the day-to-day management of Waterloo Care Home and leading the team of staff. As registered manager she also shares the legal responsibility for meeting the requirements of the relevant regulations with Agincare.

As such, Tammy is responsible for making sure the whole home operates effectively and delivers the very best quality care to her residents, meeting national care standards.

“When the CQC inspected Waterloo in July 2019, we were hugely disappointed that they rated us as ‘requiring improvement’ in two of the five categories: ‘safe’ and ‘well-led’.

I would like to reassure residents, families and staff that this rating is due to a failing around paperwork, not in the standard of care provided in the home. At no time were any residents negatively affected by the points raised by the inspectors.

I would encourage you to read the full CQC report. On the whole it is really quite positive, describing our staff as well-trained and experienced in the needs of the people we care for. The report also recognises that as a home, we work in an honest, open and transparent way, that the care we give is person-centred, that our residents are happy and families have confidence in the care we provide.

In the report the inspectors note that we support people to live life as they wish, making sure they have access to services, such as the dentist, chiropodist and hairdresser. The inspectors also describe how the Waterloo team supports our residents to take part in activities in our local community, such as lunch clubs and gardening clubs.

The inspectors also found that we learn and adapt when needed, and we are determined to learn from this inspection, using what we have learnt to improve our residents’ lives and how we work.

We have already put an action plan in place to make sure that we are complying with the regulations and that all of our documentation is current, relevant and effective. We are always looking to see how changes to the home might improve our residents’ lives.

We feel strongly about not taking away what makes Waterloo Care Home great – which is its homely and welcoming feel. However, we have taken on board the inspectors’ feedback, putting up some new signage around the building.

We are confident that all our residents are able make their way around the home safely. We welcome people coming into Waterloo to see the home for themselves, meet the team and the residents and chat with myself or a member of the senior team.”

Tim Buckley, Chief Operating Officer of Agincare Homes Holdings

“I’m proud of Waterloo, and am positive any visitor would feel confident about a loved one being in our care there. Reading the CQC report, what comes across really strongly is the genuine respect and affection the care staff have for their residents. Residents and family members describe the team as thoughtful, reassuring, caring and friendly, and I think those words are spot-on. We never forget that Waterloo is our residents’ home.

However, there are areas we need to improve, and we are already addressing them, tightening up on record-keeping and improving signage. There’s no doubt that we are all determined to show the CQC that we’ve listened and acted when they next inspect Waterloo.”