Enter and View Report: Redholme Memory Care

In August 2025 we visited Redholme Memory Care, a residential care home providing residential EMI (Elderly Mentally Infirm) and nursing care for a maximum of 55 people. There are 10 residential care beds and 45 EMI nursing complex needs beds in total, and all residents are living with advanced dementia.

Residents live in one of 3 units over 3 floors; the John McCann unit is the largest with 30 bedrooms and is a mixed sex unit (male/ female residents). The home also has 2 smaller single sex units, the Lillian Baker unit supporting 13 women, and the Linden unit which supports 12 men.

The home has 29 ensuite bedrooms with all other bedrooms having shared facilities. The home can provide a double room for couples and siblings. At the time of our visit there was one married couple living in a double room at the home.

The home has an attached day centre in a separate building, but we were told that this had to be closed as funding from the council had been stopped during the Covid pandemic and had not been resumed since due to a lack of funding. 

Summary

During our enter and view visit we found Redholme Memory Care home to be clean and well maintained with no unpleasant smells. Residents looked clean and appropriately dressed, Parts of the buildings are older and not purpose-built which can make it more difficult to make the environment dementia-friendly, and there were some areas where an improvement could be made, e.g. making sure all handrails are painted in a contrasting colour to the walls.

At Redholme the staff that that we spoke to were vocal about their responsibility to their residents and how much the home means to them as both people and professionals. Staff appeared knowledgeable about dementia care with a knowledge of the latest research, information and best practice. Residents appeared to be well-looked after, and interactions we observed during our visit showed staff to be respectful, caring and supportive.

Since our visit to Redholme Memory Care we have had additional feedback from other nursing homes about the impacts of changes to the pathways involving end-of-life pain relief. We have been feeding this back to commissioners, and this will continue to be on our radar.

We also continue to raise the difficulties of accessing dental care for residents who can’t leave the home, as this is an ongoing gap in provision and should not be reliant on just one dentist for the whole city of Liverpool. A lack of dental care leads to not only reduced quality of life but also poor health outcomes and increased risk of hospitalisation.

Recommendations

We make the following recommendations for Redholme Memory Care home:

• As mentioned by a relative, having name badges with first names is good for visitors but can also assist residents, especially those whose memory may be impaired
• In some – but not all - areas the colour of the handrails was the same as the walls, making them harder to distinguish. We would recommend changing this, if possible, to make them visually stand out more.

Positives and good practice

We found during our visit to Redholme Memory Care home examples of positives and good practice which included but were not limited to: 

There seemed to be a real effort to understand Dementia and its impact on the person and their families. There were multiple examples of Redholme putting this knowledge into practice including-

• The pilot of a new app which links residents with families who live further away, as well as providing other activities on a large screen. We look forward to hearing more about this pilot in the future.
• Several exit doors had been painted to resemble bookcases to help prevent residents with restrictions hanging around these areas and trying to leave.
• The bus stop that had been recreated in one of the corridors to allow residents to wait and help with behaviours of wanting to return to other locations.