“Serendipity… This is a story about how sitting next to two people can lead to something new and exciting, which will affect the quality of older people’s lives for the better.”
This year we decided to revamp our team meetings post Covid and the result was even better than we had anticipated. To have so many people working together to create better outcomes for residents and the team was empowering and at times, emotional.
As the meetings were held in February we wanted to celebrate LGBT+ history month; our aim being to further develop our conversations around LGBTQI+ and the elderly community and to see what we can do to support people as they make their journey into care. We created a safe space for our team to talk openly and candidly and to evidence all the outstanding work they do on a daily basis as well as identify areas for improvement.
We were honored to have Pauline Smith as our guest speaker for all the meetings, giving every member of our team a chance to listen to her story. Pauline is a mature trans woman, who “came out” 25 years ago, since her return to the UK in 2008 she continued to do consulting work for ten years; and from 2010 onwards she became actively involved in the LGBT community in Manchester and the UK. A lot of Pauline’s time in the past fourteen years has been spent actively contributing to programmes and activities for the LGBT community in Greater Manchester, especially for transgender and older people, as well as being involved in community activities outside the LGBT community on programmes which support all older people.
We are so grateful to Pauline for joining us for these sessions and for our team who engaged so positively and compassionately.
