Care Home Activities: Why One Activity Doesn’t Work for Every Resident
Care home activities can’t be one-size-fits-all — and if you’re still running the same bingo session, week after week, for every resident regardless of who they are, it’s worth asking whether that’s really serving them. Every resident in your home is different. They have different histories, different learning styles, different things they loved and things they couldn’t stand. Treating activity provision as a single fixed timetable misses that entirely.
You’ve got to know how to interact with them. You’ve got to understand their life style, their learning styles, and things that they disliked and what they like.
Activity Coordinators Are More Than a 9–5 Role
Every person working inside a care home is part of an ecosystem — everyone doing their part, everyone there to help one another. That includes the people who’ve been doing this for years and know the ropes, and the people who are newer and bring fresh ideas and new ways of thinking. If a home keeps doing things exactly the way it always has, that’s as far as it’s ever going to go. Growth means being willing to stretch, to learn, and to let new thinking sit alongside experience rather than replace it.
Why Care Home Activities Need Fresh Thinking
Activity coordinators can fall into the trap of sticking to the same routine for years. But the people living in care homes today are not the same as they were thirty years ago — their interests, references, and life experiences have changed, and activity provision needs to evolve with them. That doesn’t mean throwing out everything that’s worked before. It means bringing in the old alongside genuinely new ideas, rather than relying on habit alone.
AI Should Enhance Care, Not Replace It
Technology has a role to play here too, but it’s worth being clear about what that role actually is. AI has learned everything it knows from us — it hasn’t developed the way a human does, growing and adapting through lived experience from the ground up. Humans think outside the box in ways AI simply can’t; we understand what another human being would enjoy, what would genuinely land with them, in a way that comes from shared experience rather than data alone.
Some organisations make the mistake of using AI to replace staff outright, and then wonder why they’re still having problems. AI should sit alongside people, not instead of them. Every person working in a care home brings something to it that technology can support, but never substitute.
Why Every Resident Needs a Different Approach
This is the heart of it: you can run the same activity with two different residents and get two completely different outcomes, because no two people respond to things the same way. Understanding a resident’s life story, their learning style, what stimulated them in the past and what didn’t, is what turns an activity from generic to genuinely person-centred. The same activity — say, bingo — can be delivered in a dozen different ways depending on who’s in the room, and whether it’s a group session or a one-to-one.
Getting this right does two things at once. It gives residents a better quality of life, and it gives the coordinator delivering it real recognition for the difference their work is making — recognition that’s often invisible until someone starts paying attention to outcomes rather than attendance.
Meaningful Activities and Brain Stimulation
Losing my twin brother three years ago is part of why I created Still Me™. There were people, like him, who couldn’t speak for themselves, who were vulnerable, who were reaching the end of their life — and they still deserved that same quality of life and choice. But you can’t give someone that without knowing how to reach them. You have to understand their life story and bring their memories back to them in a way that means something specifically to them, not to residents in general.
Brain stimulation doesn’t have to be complicated or overthought. It can be as simple as sitting in the garden one day and doing something different in the office the next. The goal isn’t novelty for its own sake — it’s making sure residents come away feeling good, empowered, and like they genuinely participated, rather than just having been present.
Letting Families See the Impact
Family members living miles away want to know what’s actually happening with their mother, father, brother, sister, or friend day to day — not just that they’re safe, but that they’re living well. When activity coordinators create real, positive outcomes for residents, that’s something worth letting families see. It builds trust, and it also reflects directly on the home’s overall rating.
Turning Everyday Activities Into CQC Evidence
None of this has to mean reinventing the wheel. In the UK, CQC regulations increasingly focus on brain stimulation and person-centred activity, whatever a resident’s age, frailty, or mental health needs. The shift worth making is simple: instead of just running an activity and moving on, start capturing what participation actually looked like, what conversations came out of it, and what the outcome was for that resident. That’s what turns everyday care home activities into genuine CQC evidence — outcome-based evidence that sits on the resident’s file, built from the work coordinators are already doing every day.
This is exactly the gap the Still Me™ platform was built to close — helping coordinators capture that evidence as part of the activity itself, rather than as extra work at the end of a shift.
The Future of the Activity Coordinator Role
Becoming the person who really analyses each resident — rather than the person who just runs the same timetable — is what raises a care home’s standard of activity provision, and its rating along with it. Great care home activities take a shift in thinking: from “we’re doing bingo today” to “what does this particular resident need today, and how will I know it worked?” That shift is where real quality of life, and real evidence, both come from.
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