How We Are Helping Nursing Home Residents Cope With Lockdown

At Acorn Insurance we wanted to help bring “some of the outside world in” to local nursing home residents who are not allowed visitors right now.

We decided to get involved in the An Post initiative, whereby you can post a letter or card into a nursing/care home free of charge.

At the start of the second lockdown, we reached out to our Acorn Insurance team and encouraged them to get the kids or adults involved and submit a letter, card, picture, or poem, and the response has been outstanding!

This has been a really enjoyable and rewarding experience for the whole Acorn team. Sitting down to write a letter like this has given us the opportunity to reconnect with our creative sides and has brought positivity into our own lives as well as the lives of those receiving our letters.

The best part of this initiative is it’s easy and free for you to get involved too! We encourage you to reach out to your local nursing or care homes for their address or perhaps the name of a resident you could write to. Once you have written your letter all you have to do is write Freepost where you would normally place the stamp and pop it in the post.

To help you with writing your first letter, we asked a manager in a local nursing home for some advice:

• You could start the letter with “Hello, my name is…”
• Use general content: your day to day activities, your weekend, the weather, family, Christmas plans, any pets or hobbies you have
• Anything to bring the outdoor world into the residents and help to brighten up their day!

These letters or cards will be read out to the residents in the day rooms and sometimes they like to write a little reply. We included the Acorn Insurance address in our letters, and we encourage you to include yours in your letter too so your recipient can respond if they wish to.

There is truly something personal, heartfelt and meaningful about taking time out of your day to write someone a letter.It can be amazingly therapeutic to translate your own thoughts on paper and receiving a handwritten letter in the post is really a special feeling. We hope that this inspires you to write your own letter and brighten up someone’s day, and we have no doubt that you will enjoy this experience as much as we have!