ABSTRACT
The role of the activity provider is poorly understood and poorly tolerated in many care staff teams. Like the staff team, volunteers and relatives can be a rich resource of talents and skills that the activity provider can put to good use. They can, however, be a mixed blessing and they need to be engaged with caution. Clients are rarely seen as a resource, but they should be. One of the greater deprivations of the increasing frailty of old age is the diminishing opportunity to give to others, either in tangible ways or in service. Every care setting should have a database of local community and national resources which can be tapped for specialist contributions to activity provision. A garden can be a rich resource of sensory stimulation; this should be a consideration where the unit has any number of people with a more advanced dementia.
