Unlikely as it seems, a project involving hens is giving pensioners – or should that be hensioners? – a new lease of life. Sarah Millington reports

ELLA Armstrong sits clutching a striped fabric hen, her face the picture of delight. She decorated it herself last week as part of an activity led by visual artist Hannah Shaw and today, Hannah has returned with the finished article. Ella seems astonished by her own handiwork. “That looks lovely, doesn’t it?” she says, looking out into the garden where three hens and three chicks scratch around. “They’ve jumped on me three times,” she says good-naturedly.

Ella may not remember her age but she knows that the care home where she lives, Comfort House, in Newcastle, is also home to the avian residents. She might not be involved in their day-to-day care – though others relish the opportunity of feeding and tending them – but she loves the hen-inspired arts and crafts which are a regular feature at the home. Like an increasing number of care settings, Comfort House is part of the HenPower project, and in the year that the hens have been there, life has changed immeasurably.

Run by Gateshead-based Equal Arts, a charity dedicated to providing creative outlets for older people, HenPower was established four years ago as a means of engaging care home residents. It involves not just keeping hens, but using them as a basis for activities and for interacting with the wider community – for example, by taking them to schools. Having never reared them before, Douglas Hunter, co-director at Equal Arts, now has three of his own and takes in hen-pecked birds for respite. He says the project began by chance.

“It started at Shadon House care home in Gateshead, which is a local authority-managed dementia assessment centre,” he says. “There was a resident who talked about missing his friends, and it took a while for staff to work out that the friends were his hens. We help at that assessment centre and the manager said, ‘Is there any reason why we couldn’t have hens here?’ We did a little bit of research and bought six hens, a second-and hen house, spent 200 quid and did a bit of staff training. We thought we would run the project for six months and within a short time, it was obvious that it was a huge success. Staff loved it, residents loved it, family members loved it. Everyone was talking about the hens.”

Buoyed by this success, Equal Arts applied for a Big Lottery grant to deliver the project in eight care homes. It secured £164,000 to introduce it in a range of settings, from independent living accommodation to care providers for dementia. While each responded differently, adapting HenPower to meet their residents’ needs, all noticed positive results.

“Quite a few independently living older men had kept kens previously and they went from being quite lonely and just being able to say hello to people to building up a close group of friends – all based around looking after the hens,” says Douglas. “The next thing, they wanted to hatch their own, so they raised their own chicks and took them to poultry markets and, within a short period of time, they ended up with 48 hens.

“They would then take them to other care homes and talk to other older people as peers about why they loved looking after hens. They started taking their hens to primary schools – the lifecycle of an egg is on the national curriculum. It’s an act of learning for the kids and it gives the older people a sense of purpose and pleasure and a role and responsibility, where their sense of role and responsibility has been diminished.”

Equal Arts found that it wasn’t just the more able who were transformed by the hens’ presence. Even those with severe dementia enjoyed watching and handling them or were keen to participate in arts and crafts. A study by Northumbria University reflected the charity’s observations, finding that the project improved well-being and reduced depression and loneliness among older people. Douglas believes its benefits are significant and manifold.

“Older people who have dementia will start thinking, ‘When is my daughter going to arrive?’ ‘When is the doctor going to arrive?’ and that can manifest itself in violent or abusive outbursts,” he says. “Pharmaceuticals are used to manage this, but we need another way, so we take them outside to see the hens and, within a few minutes, they’ve forgotten about what they were agitated about and they’ve had a calm, relaxing experience. It’s a positive distraction and it has led to reduced use of anti-psychotic meds, reduced incidents of violent and aggressive behaviour and reduced staff sickness due to stress.”

For Douglas, the hens are merely a facilitator, opening the way for communications among residents and between residents and staff and residents and their families. Despite initial scepticism, Robert Lyall, manager at Comfort House, has seen people’s spirits lift as well as an upturn in visitor numbers.

“I think my initial response was ‘Can we have the creative part without the hens?’ but when I started asking the residents, they all seemed very keen on having them,” he says. “Everybody seemed to have a hen story. We’ve had residents move here because we’ve got them and we’ve definitely had more kids during the school holidays. It’s probably worked better than I could have ever dreamed of.”

Keen to understand their appeal, Equal Arts embarked on a project looking at oral histories of hen keeping over the last 75 years. It found that this has progressed from being a practical way of putting food on the table, through the romanticised self-sufficiency of TV sitcom The Good Life to the current middle class trend featured in lifestyle magazines. Fundamental to hens’ attraction seems to be an inherent connection between people and animals and their practicality as pets. “They’re always there, but they are quite independent,” says Douglas. “They’re quite low maintenance and looking after them is a shared responsibility.”

Now operating at 20 care homes throughout the region, HenPower is expanding to other parts of the country, including London and Leeds. Equal Arts is keen to recruit more staff, particularly in the County Durham area, and is currently looking for those skilled in any or all of the creative arts, hen keeping and older people’s care. As word of its success spreads, there is even the prospect of the project going international.

“We are looking at a franchise,” says Douglas. “There’s a care home group in Australia who would like a HenPower Australia. Similarly, we’ve had conversations with groups in California. In Australia, they call hens ‘chooks’. There was a conversation where they said, ‘Can we call it ChookPower?’ and we said, ‘no’.

“It is a bit bonkers. It started off with 200 quid, half a dozen hens and a second-hand hen house and, within six years, we will have generated £2m. It’s got to be good fun. It’s got to be henjoyable.”

equalarts.org.uk/henpower