My Home Life Northern Ireland

My Home Life Northern Ireland (MHLNI) is part of a wider international initiative (My Home Life) and registered charity (No. 1187498) which promotes quality of life and delivers positive change in care homes.

Each partner organisation works independently, and research findings and resources are shared with the care home sector and with other partners and stakeholders through the MHL website.

The core of the MHL initiative is a leadership support programme. In Northern Ireland we provide the leadership programme with an additional quality Improvement strand and the programme is led by Ulster University in partnership with Age NI and the Independent Health Care Providers (IHCP).

MHL has worked with over 60 academic researchers from universities across the UK to develop the evidence base for quality of life in care homes.

The review of evidence explored ‘what residents want from care homes’ and ‘what practices work in care homes.’

The evidence was found to cluster around Eight Best Practice Themes (National Care Homes Research & Development Forum, 2007).

The eight themes emanating from this review along with the evidence base underpinning Relationship-Centred Care very much informs the content of the Leadership Support Programme.  The ways of working draw on Appreciative Inquiry and Caring Conversations

My Home Life Northern Ireland Image
How it started Image

How it started

My Home Life began in 2006 as a small project to synthesise the literature on best practice in care homes.

Since then, it has grown into a social movement to promote quality of life for those who are living, dying, visiting and working in care homes for older people.

Over the past decade My Home Life has developed an international reputation for facilitating positive culture change and enabling care homes to both professionalise and articulate their expertise. It was launched in Wales in 2008, Scotland in 2012 and in Northern Ireland in 2013.

In Northern Ireland, the programme began in 2013 with a Knowledge Transfer grant from the Research and Development Office of the Public Health Agency.  It is delivered by a team of researchers in the School of Nursing and Paramedic Science at Ulster University, who have a strong track record of research with older people and care homes, and to date, the programme has generated research funding in excess of £2 million.

Introducing My Home Life Northern Ireland

Core Work of My Home Life

The core work of My Home Life includes:

Research and quality improvement

Research and quality improvement, with a particular emphasis on collaborative action research, facilitated through the development and use of creative and inclusive methods.

Developing educational and practice resources

Developing educational and practice resources, and creating the conditions for their translation and use.

Leadership Support

Leadership support to enable care home leaders to empower staff and to foster relationship-centred cultures within their care homes.

Community Engagement

Community engagement to strengthen relationships between care homes and their local communities.

Engaging and influencing at a national level

Engaging and influencing at national level through stakeholder engagement and social action, highlighting the implications of systemic failure to properly value care in policy or in wider society and evidencing the need to afford staff the time, space, resources and recognition required if they are to flourish in increasingly complex environments.

The Future

To date 27 cohorts have successfully completed the Leadership Support Programme in NI.

On 31st October 2025 we will have completed the fifth year of Department of Health funding which is  the 11th year of My Home Life in Northern Ireland.  By this stage, based on current figures,  we will have supported 365 individuals to complete the programmme.   However, there are still 238  care homes who have not been through the programme and we are requesting a further year of funding to narrow this gap.  It is noteworthy that our recruitment target of 100 participants has been exceeded in Years 4 (2023/2024) and 5 (2024/2025)  resulting in a waiting list for the programme.

Our programme has always aligned the Appreciative Inquiry model  with the ‘Plan, Do, Study, Act’ methodology recent and focus has seen excellent impact in key areas such as Community Engagement, Systems Integration, meaningful connections and Transitions.  These key areas have potential to be developed further in the coming years.

We are grateful for the support from the department of health and all our partners Ulster University, AgeNI, Northern Ireland Social Care Council (NISCC), Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA), Patient and Client Council NI (PCC-NI), Independent Health & Care Providers (IHCP) and Public Health Agency (PHA) for their support to improve the quality of life for people living, dying, visiting, and working in nursing and residential homes.

Heath Minister, Mike Nesbitt said "Ulster University’s delivery of the My Home Life (MHL) Leadership Support Programme for Care Homes on behalf of the Department, has been one of the key drivers in improving the quality of life for care home residents, relatives and staff across Northern Ireland (NI) since 2013."