Effective Planning

Your Questions Answered: “I spend a lot of time planning my activity programme. Is it really worth doing all this planning and preparation? How can I reduce the amount of time I spend on it?”

Activity coordinator and Daily Sparkle lead trainer Helen Johns writes …

Planning your activity programme is an important part of your role to ensure that you are providing a meaningful activity programme. This means a programme which meets the needs of individual residents and the overall resident population of your home.

In order to meet the needs of the individual you will need to know:

  • Something about their life history.
  • Something about their current preferences.
  • Something about their current abilities (they may have always enjoyed art but can’t paint in the same way so you may need to modify your activity).

Let’s also consider what would be the risk of not planning?

  • On a basic level – you wouldn’t know what to do each day until you arrived and residents would not know what is coming up.
  • You wouldn’t be prepared with the correct resources available on the day and could potentially waste time collecting things for the activity.
  • You wouldn’t know whether you were meeting a range of individual needs across the week/month/seasons etc. Everyone has a range of needs such as physical, social, emotional, spiritual, vocational, cognitive and community involvement.
  • How would you know whether each resident has had their ‘fair share’ of activity time – depending on their individual needs and preferences?
  • Staff members may not be able to assist you if they do not know what is happening on that day. The help they provide may be as simple as escorting people to the right location or they may join in with the activity. Without advance notice they may not be able to commit their time.
  • Family and friends would not know what is coming up in the calendar. In particular family members may like to join in or may save their visit for another day when the social calendar isn’t so busy.

Of course, it is fine to have a plan and then change it on the day if you need to. For example if you plan to host a cinema morning, and you arrive to find that the weather is glorious, and this is an ideal opportunity to get out in the garden, then by all means ‘make hay when the sun shines’ and get out there! I can’t imagine anyone criticising you for making the best of the opportunities available to you.

That said, ensuring all these things can take time and, as a general rule, you don’t want to spend so long preparing that your residents are subsequently deprived of your time.

Tips for cutting down on the amount of time include:

  • Allocate a specific portion of time each week/month and stick to that.
  • Ask for help – other team members may enjoy helping with planning and preparing even if they can’t get involved with the activity. Family members are also often willing to help out.
  • Ask residents if they would like to help with planning and preparation. Often activity coordinators forget that there are many pairs of willing and able hands to help you.
  • Don’t feel that your activity programme has to be filled with ‘big events’. Some simple, small scale, meaningful activities may make more of a difference to individual residents.
  • Re-use and recycle much loved activities – it doesn’t always have to be something new.
  • Big events may take a bit more planning – so I would suggest that you do this over a longer period of time.
  • Evaluate what works and what needs to be improved so you don’t waste time on unpopular activities.

The Daily Sparkle – a resource I have used a lot in my day-to-day role – is not only a great source of activities, but also has lots of planning tools to help you cut down on the amount of time you spend planning. This resource includes:

  • Weekly Planner that lets you know which articles are coming up in the Daily or Weekly Sparkle.
  • Content Inspired Activity Session Planner – suggested activities relating to the articles in the Daily or Weekly Sparkle.
  • Resource Pack Plans – giving you advance notice of the content of the Resource Magazines.

And finally – don’t beat yourself up. We are all a ‘work in progress’ and as long as you are creating a plan with individual residents’ needs at the forefront of your mind, you will be doing a good job. Good luck!