An essential home delivery shopping service with a smile

Covid-19 has spread around the planet, sending billions of people into lockdown, and continues to leave older people in communities across the UK extremely vulnerable, lonely and isolated. Families that would have normally provided the regular support and company for their loved ones, have sadly not been able to, which has meant daily activities such as essential shopping, visits to hospitals, and community social activities have been brought to a halt.

In Crosby, Radfield Home Care Liverpool North, outside of its regular care services, has stepped in to provide ongoing support to older people in the community, working closely with its community partner ‘Marine in the Community – Community Cafe‘ delivering regular free lunches to members of the group, many of which being Radfield clients.

In addition, Dave Bellis, owner and director of Radfield has also been offering a free home delivery shopping service. Where food and grocery shopping help for the elderly has been particularly challenging to do a regular grocery shop.

Dave explains, “As soon as we realised that our clients were struggling to get a regular home food delivery slot from local supermarkets, unable to get to the shops themselves, or not being able to rely on friends and family as they previously would have done, we reached out to them, via letters and phone calls offering this service for essential items twice weekly free of charge.”

Dave’s wife Lin, along with Lin’s sister have been rallying around to provide this service since the covid lockdown. Lin explains, “When Dave mentioned this to me, I couldn’t think of a better way to help. My sister and I are both teaching assistants at a local primary school, and have been working on a rota since lockdown, giving us more free time to be able to help out. The shopping lists from Radfield clients come into the office in many different ways; phone calls, whatsapp messages, or via our care professionals, and my sister and I, do the regular shop twice a week in the local Sainsbury’s supermarket.”

“The staff at Sainsbury’s are very friendly and supportive and are now very used to seeing us regularly arrive with two large trolleys filled with individual baskets for each client, to keep each client’s grocery delivery separate from each other and have been regularly shopping for eight or nine clients since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Lin and Dave’s daughter, Maddie, have also been helping out with the shopping trips explaining, “It always puts a smile on my face to see ‘cakes’ at the top of the clients shopping list. It’s lovely to know that they still like to have treats in the house!”

The Radfield Home Care office has received an overwhelming amount of thank you’s in various ways, with ‘thankyou’ cards, emails and Whatsapp messages from clients and their families thanking them for going above and beyond the care and support they are providing their loved ones.

Carl, a son of a Radfield client commented in an email to the office, “Hi Dave, I have just been on the phone to Dad, he is very happy with the home delivery services and, as I didn’t tell him beforehand about the cakes, he was surprised and very pleased. He sounds a lot better than he has done for a couple of days which is very good. He mentioned a food shopping parcel tomorrow which he is looking forward to. Many thanks to yourself and everyone there for your hard work.”

If you would like to find out more about Radfield Home Care and the adult social care support services offered, you can visit www.radfieldhomecare.co.uk/220/about-us or [email protected] or 0151 3211 770.