Forget everything you think you know about care homes,

We want to do our best to keep people safe at Coombe, but we have also always had a commitment to freedom and quality of life.

We have always had our doors open, and want the people who live with us to be able to come and go as they wish.

However,  we also want to respond quickly if we find there is something we could do to improve the way we work in any way at all.

To this end, we have  installed a CCTV camera half way up our drive to the house.

This means that we will be able to see people walking up and down the drive, both towards and away from the house.

It links to a mobile phone, which will sound an alert for us to see who is out and about.

We can do a variety of clever things with the information, one of which will be to identify the time someone has left, and what they were wearing, as well as take a photograph of the event.

We hope this will help us if we need to drive out to find someone.  This doesn’t happen often, but we do want to be able to respond both quickly and well when it does.

We have set this up to monitor people walking rather than in vehicles.

It is for the purposes of identification and safety only, and I do not anticipate we would keep any irrelevant information for more than a month.

We have displayed a sign outside the gate, to remind families and visitors that they may be caught on CCTV,  and how to contact us if they wish to see what we hold on our records.

If you have any worries about the CCTV, then please feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to discuss the system.

A copy of this information is in the care plans for our residents.

We have also made sure that our staff team are happy with this, and they have signed to say they understand how and why this information is recorded, for what purpose, and how long it might be kept.