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…we asked our Visitors, Family members, Staff, and Residents, and then  invited them all to our Digni-Tea Party to highlight our Dignity week.

The Retired Vicar-  Chris from St Luke’s in Sway spoke about incidents made public in the last weeks, incidents where women were not treated respectfully.

Chris reminded everyone that we can only live in peace if everybody is treated with dignity, no matter who, no matter where!

Gathering around our Dignity Tree in our Sensory Garden after the new plaque was mounted

Some of you might already know that we have a permanent ‘real’ Dignity -Tree growing in the Sensory Garden outside Peggy’s Café. It was donated by Stewart’s Garden Centre in Highcliffe-Christchurch last year. This young Acer tree is dedicated to our late residents – even though they are gone from Birchy Hill, they will never be forgotten. This year the tree was given a brand-new plaque which reads:

“Dignity Tree in Memoriam of our late Residents”

Sylvia, a retired nurse and writer of many lovely books, has been visiting many friends and family members in Birchy Hill for many years, and has become a true friend of our Home. She gave us the honour to mount the plaque and spoke afterwards to the residents.

Thank you Sylvia – this was very much appreciated!

Staff as well as Friends of Birchy Hill were invited to enjoy a training session about ‘Dignity’.

Different Nationalities, different age groups, different opinions!

The session lead to very emotional discussions about Dignity in all aspects of life. But in the end everybody agreed that we have to respect each other to live a life in dignity.

We celebrated Dignity with a full week of events, starting with a Crafts morning, where the Residents and the Staff alike made leaves and hearts for our ‘Digni-Tree’ (as shown in the other article)

In the afternoon Information about Dignity in Care was given to our little audience. Opinions and wishes about the topic were brought together and we concluded that Dignity is also Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion.

The ‘leaves’ were labelled with quotes and representatives from our 5 units hung them up the tree.

Our favourite quote was ‘Dignity is respecting other people’s choices!’