Meet Tony Charlesworth, one of our homes’ heroes!

Creating an iPad stand and dressing as Julie Andrews are just a few things I’ve done for our residents recently.

I’ve worked at Anchor for eight years now, I started as a Care Assistant at Cranlea, one of our other care homes near here. My mum used to live here at Northbourne and I started working bank shifts as Handyperson as well as Care Assistant before I got the permanent job as Handyperson. My wife also works here as a Team Leader so it’s a real family affair.

I love working at Northbourne, it’s a really friendly atmosphere. We were already a close team but this has got even stronger over the last few weeks. We’re all working so hard to look after the people who live with us and keep everyone safe. Our residents are doing well but they’re missing their families a lot, which I can appreciate as I’m missing my family too, especially my grandchildren. I’ve got a new grandson who’s only three months old so I can’t wait to see him when we can. We’ve come up with a few things to cheer our residents up and keep the morale of the team up – hence dressing as Julie Andrews in a Coronavirus version of a song from the Sound of Music that we posted on our facebook page…. Emma, Deputy Manager, and Amy, our Wellness Coordinator, talked me into that one! We had lots of nice comments from family members, so it was worth it.

We’re also helping residents keep in touch with family and friends using our iPad. I noticed that a few people were struggling to hold the iPad while they were talking so I’ve made our own customised stand in our Man Cave - that’s one of the great spaces we’ve created in our home. I didn’t want to just make something that was functional I wanted it to look good too. It made me feel really proud to see my colleagues smile when they saw it.

I enjoy my role as handyperson, I’ve been able to use my skills to create lots of things for our home including the shop counter made from a palette and lots of pennies and the bar tables out of old whiskey barrels. I’ve just finished making some mini picnic tables for our garden so we can encourage more wildlife into our garden. There’s lots more wildlife around with less cars on the road so that’s a positive thing to come out of the current situation.