ARU Research Report 2019

24 The Up Project What Are the Challenges for Older Adults & Care Home Staff? It was difficult during interviews with care home staff and relatives to engage them in any feedback which was not positive and reflective of benefits to the care home and those living there. They almost unanimously shared the sentiment that they hoped that the project would continue, from which came apprehensions about the disappointment of older adults should it not in the future: ‘Yeah, I’d love it to continue; it has such an impact on these people and their lives and, like I said at the beginning, there’s days they don’t do anything so these days are really important and to take it away would be a shame. In fact, I might make it a criminal act actually if you take it away!.’ (Care home staff) Care home staff also picked up on the uniqueness of the impact the project had, compared to other activities within the home, identifying the disappointment of older adults that it could not be all year round: ‘I tell you what, I’ll be honest with you, the most upsetting time for some of our residents over the whole course of the thing was the summer holidays because they haven’t got that, because it’s taken away from them. There are other things that they get involved in which is quite nice but it’s still not the children that they look forward to seeing.’ (Care home staff) What Are the Reciprocal Benefits to Older Adults & Children? There were a number of benefits for each group which were mutual, and seemed to feed into shared positive experiences and genuine relationships which bridged the gap across the ages. The mutuality of the experience is best captured by a comment from one child in response to the memories and activities shared: ‘All that stuff though always makes our day, and I feel like it makes their day too.’ (Child 5) Reciprocal Connectivity The visits are described as an opportunity for genuine and reciprocal relationships to be built. For children the foundation of these relationships are based on humorous stories and memories, which connect them to particular older adults. Children recounted their visits with affection, regarding some older adults to be friends, and to some like family. The indicative responses from children when describing their interactions with the older were ‘I loved it’ (Child 6) and ‘It’s really, really fun’ (Child 2). Equally children described the older adults’ happiness at their visits and exchanges, which gave them a sense of value and appreciation. For the children they appeared to see their role as that to provide older adults with opportunities for happiness: ‘You do build really good relationships and friendships with them, and they’re really nice to you all of the time, so they feel like friends, and maybe your family if they’re that nice to you.’ (Child 7) ‘We didn’t really help them, it was just something for them to have something to do in their day, because they’re in a care home, and they might not be as happy in the day, so it was just something to make them happy, and we would do word searches, games, colouring and stuff like that with them, so it was more of a thing to make people happy, not just to help them.’ (Child 3) Care home staff too described the relationships between children and older adults, both the older adults’ enjoyment of the visits, but also the behavior of children in supporting the older adults. The term genuine was used often to refer to these connections: