Home Care in Exmouth

Home care in Exmouth, and what makes the town different

Exmouth is the largest town in East Devon, with something over thirty-five thousand people, and it sits where the Exe estuary meets the sea, eleven miles south-east of Exeter down the A376. It has two miles of sand, a flat esplanade, a marina, and at Orcombe Point the first stretch of the Jurassic Coast. It is also, by any measure, a town where people retire. Walk along the front on a weekday morning and most of the people you pass are over seventy. They came for the sea and the quiet, and they are not planning to leave.

That shapes what home care in Exmouth looks like. A lot of the people who need help here moved to the town later in life, which means their children are often elsewhere, in Exeter, in Bristol, in London. The daughter who rings me is ringing from a long way away, and what she wants is somebody local, reliable and the same every time, who will tell her what is actually going on. That is the job.

The furthest I go, and how I make it work

I should be plain about the geography. Exmouth is about half an hour from the rest of my patch, and the whole point of working the way I do is that visits are not squeezed by the journey to the next one. So I treat Exmouth differently. I will plan Exmouth visits together on the same days, Lympstone and Exton on the way in, so that the drive happens once and the hours in the town are full hours. If you need a visit at a particular time on a particular day, tell me at the first call and I will give you a straight answer about whether I can keep to it. I would rather say no at the start than be late every week.

A visit booked for an hour is an hour, in Exmouth as anywhere else. The travel is my problem, not yours, and the rate is the same.

Bungalows, flats and the hill

Exmouth has more bungalows than most towns its size, which is one of the reasons people retired here, and a bungalow is the easiest kind of home to go on living in. No stairs, usually a level path to the door, and a bathroom that can be adapted. The flats along the seafront and up the hill are a different matter. Lifts that are sometimes out of order, long corridors, and a front door that is a long way from the car. I will look at all of that at the free first visit, because getting in and out safely is often the thing that decides whether somebody can stay.

The hospital, the surgery and the chemist

Exmouth Hospital on Claremont Grove has a minor injuries unit open every day from eight in the morning to eight at night, and an X-ray department on weekdays, which means a fall or a bad cut does not always mean a trip to Exeter. For anything the hospital in Exmouth cannot do, the Royal Devon and Exeter at Wonford is about thirty to forty minutes by car, and I will drive, park and wait. Prescriptions, blood tests at the surgery, the dentist on the Strand. Appointments are the thing families far away worry about most, and they are the thing I can take off their plate most easily.

Getting out, by the sea

Few places in Devon are as easy to get out in as Exmouth. The Esplanade is flat, the benches are frequent, and the view does the rest. Manor Gardens is a short level walk from the town centre and Phear Park is a little further up. For somebody who used to walk the front every morning and has stopped because it felt too far on their own, walking it again with a hand on the arm is worth more than any amount of television. If a visit can include half an hour by the sea, it should.

What I do not do

I work alone, and for a town half an hour away that has one honest consequence. I cannot be the person who pops round at ten minutes' notice, and I cannot be there through the night. If somebody in Exmouth needs that, or needs two people to move safely, or needs nursing, I will say so at the first visit and help you find a service that can do it. What I can be is the same reliable person, on the same days, who knows the house and the routine and tells you what she sees.