Living in this place is more enjoyable in ways that people realize. I took it upon myself to move here after a heart attack had left me incapable of living by myself. My children, and grandchildren worried about me falling and they had to check on me every day, becoming a burden to them. So I sold my house and most of my non-personal belongings and moved here. The name doesn’t even hide the fact of what it is, Lakewood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. This is where I will spend the rest of my life.
This place isn’t one of those glamorous retirement villages you see advertised on television, it has its up and downs alike. Lakewood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, or as we here call it Lakewood for short, has more of a hospital environment than a home front. However, the building itself is nice looking and well built. Out front a large parking lot feeds into a walkway surrounded by beautiful flower gardens; they have lilies, azaleas, hydrangeas, and poppies to name a few. Large green lawns lie on either side of the gardens and make a great place to relax, and fellowship. Behind the building is a big yard with a couple smaller storage buildings dot the landscape. Including the storage sheds a porch and gazebo is attached to the rear of the building where they hold holiday parties and birthdays.
A pale green three-story building is what I now call home. I live on the second floor. Each floor is reserved for a certain demographic. The first level holds the main lobby just through the front entrance. Staff members decorate the lobby for certain seasons. It also houses the community bulletin board with calendars stating dates and times for activities like bingo, gardening, in-house game shows, and exercise. Mainly, the first floo...
... middle of paper ...
...hout a bath, constantly getting bed sores and all sorts of things. These things aren’t done on purpose, with 600 elderly to take care of with needs changing drastically every day as the residents are in their final months.
We are all destined for the third floor, whether that third floor is here at Lakewood, in a car wreck, fighting for our lives after an illness in a hospital bed, or in an alley meeting death by the blade of some thug. The third floor is a reality here we all must face at some point in our stay in Lakewood. This place is where most of us here at Lakewood will greet death. Some will be afraid that our life’s mission is still incomplete, even though we are so old and something tears at our souls from within. Others like me have made peace with our end. Every life owes a death, the debt that we all must pay, after all we are all just ashes and dust.
The Greenhill Community Center was a multi-service center in Coastal City. Its main purpose was to provide human service programs for various factors throughout life with an intergenerational setting. Some of these included day care, elder programs, music classes, and afterschool programs. It was founded in 1982 and was set up in an old schoolhouse. In short, this community center could use some help.
When Mary Jane came into the third floor she was the third person to have this job within the last two years. Things did not start out good for her she start noticing the way people worked and she then realized why the third floor had its name.
A sense of privacy is an important characteristic of a home-like environment. As Cristofetti, Gennai, and Rodeschini describe it, “The home has always represented and symbolized the passage from the external world to the internal world, from the public sphere to the private one” (2011). The décor a person fills one’s house with makes it their home, as their personality and choices are intertwined with the space (Cristofetti, Gennai, & Rodeschini, 2011). By building small homes where residents can have real privacy and can decorate their own rooms, the Green Houses provide nursing home spaces that are truly home-like, rather than
Nuland, Sherwin. How we die: Reflections on life's final chapter. New Yord: Vintage Books, 1993. 140-63. Print.
Volunteers are also an important part of rest home to provide family atmosphere to elders (Elizabeth Knox Home & Hospital, 2014 d). Residents are provided tasty and nutritious meal based on their dietary requirements. Residents are allowed to prepare their own food and coffee for themselves and family members. Each house has a kitchen and dining rooms. Each room is furnished with a television and comfortable bed. Plenty of books are available throughout rest home. Residents are encouraged for shopping by staff members and volunteers. Hairdresser facility is provided twice a week with competitive rates by advance appointment with nursing staff (Elizabeth Knox Home & Hospital, 2014
The Graveyard shift consists strictly of cleaning the living area, ironing, deep cleaning the kitchen and other responsibilities along with checking and changing the residents. John R. Bowblis and Kathryn Hyer depict the causes of lack of employees and the extra responsibilities caregivers are taking on in “Nursing Home Staffing Requirements and Input Substitution: Effects on Housekeeping, Food Service, and Activities Staff.” Bowblis and Hyer hypothesis that the increase in CRN’s may be resulting in the reduction of staff and using “This staff to replace dirty linens, provide minor cleaning to residents’ rooms, distribute food, or set up activities that residents enjoy.” (Bowblis) Increasing the number of caregivers per shift will improve the amount of time it takes to complete a task and provide the proper attention that residents
With over 1.5 million elderly and dependent adults now living in nursing homes throughout the country, abuse and neglect has become a widespread problem. Even though some nursing homes provide good care, many are subjecting helpless residents to needless suffering and death. Most residents in nursing homes are dependent on the staff for most or all their needs such as food, water, medicine, toileting, grooming- almost all their daily care. Unfortunately, many residents in nursing homes today are starved, dehydrated, over-medicated, and suffer painful pressure sores. They are often isolated, ignored and deprived of social contact and stimulation. Because of insufficient and poorly trained staff commonly found in nursing homes. Care givers are often overworked and grossly underpaid that often results in rude and abusive behavior to vulnerable residents who beg them for simple needs such as water or to be taken to the bathroom.
Formally known as Heritage Health & Rehabilitation Center, Heritage Healthcare Center is a 180 bed short term and long term skilled nursing facility located in Tallahassee, FL. It provides a number of services to the general public, like speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, short term acute care and long term care. This facility also offers a number of amenities that make each and every resident feel comfortable. There have been services, like a hair salon, activities department and trips to the mall all included in each patient’s rate at the facility.
According to JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) bed sores, also known as pressure ulcers, happen to those who have continued exposer to moisture, like urine or feces and are confined to a bed or wheelchair (Gill, 2003). What happens most of the time is that a nurse has so many patients to take care of that they just do not have the time or they do not care about individual patients. When elderly people complains or gripe about his or her position or the situation they may not have a voice in the matter because the facility is following doctors’ orders. For the most part, patients spend most of the day in their room by themselves, often only checked on during rounds. The elderly are often left to succumb to boredom and depression due to the fact of no companionship. The people who were once active in their community now have to be confined to a small room, and unfamiliar surrounding which can have devastating
Living in a care home often results in residents becoming less independent with respect to their ability to exercise their rights and responsibilities. Some care home routines restrain residents. For instance, care homes sometimes use cot-sides or cocoon beds, which are designed to reduce falls but are often ineffectual with demented residents, who tend to climb over the rails and fall from a great height. In addition, residents often develop problems such as pressure sores, incontinence, muscle wastage and worsened mental conditions due to the use of such beds.
The townhouse, a clean, concise, convenient, cookie-cut, carbon copy of society’s solution to the home. In today’s society of “Big Apples”, “Windy Cities” and “Cities of Angels”, the home has been lost under stacks of green paper. The heart of the home is being choked by the fast-paced materialism that pushes the individual into a heart attack of conformity. Society has become a speed addict for production, wanting bigger, more, and faster in the pursuit for the better. This “better” is often short-lived and quickly replaced. This cycle of replacement needs to end with a solving reinvention that will allow human life to breathe and be comfortable within its own skin. Lives are to be lived not viewed. To do this people need to break the mold that society is mass-producing and live life for themselves and up to their own standards of success and not follow the blue-print of the government’s bureaucratic and aristocratically favored system and ideals. The home should be a saran wrap covering of comfort, security, peace and enjoyment to be shared by and with loved ones. To often in today’s world the lines between business and personal have almost been blurred into oblivion. These are one of the issues that need to be stopped or altered so as to return the house to a home.
Some residents have bleach allergies, meaning they have to have their linen washed separately. Housekeeping makes sure that their linen gets washed properly. If it was not for housekeeping staff, who would wash the clothes and linen for the residents? At times, housekeeping staff is short and the facility runs out of certain linen because they did not have the proper staffing to get it ready on time. Not only does housekeeping wash the linen they are the staff who makes sure the facility is clean. The disinfect everything in the facility from rooms, to bathrooms, to entrance and exit doors. If nursing homes were to cut the staffing of housekeeping then more infection would arise in the facility because there would not be the proper amount of staffing to clean and reduce the risk of infection.
The comfort of sitting in our nice warm home in Sauk Rapids is very satisfying. Although my house brings me much luxury, another setting makes me feel very at home. Internet use, city water, a comfortable bed, and 100 miles differentiate the two places, but the environment I am in, the people I am with, and the things I do at the deer shack give me a particular kind of comfort.
When you think of nursing home facilities, what comes to mind? The smell, looks of despair or maybe the loneliness. I don’t think enough adjectives exist to describe what is seen or felt among visitors or residents. Driving up to a nursing home is an experience in itself. Nothing can really prepare you for the expectations your mind has set. Everyone should have some sort of standard they would want for their loved ones. Growing up, I spent countless hours at different nursing home facilities. My mom was a nurse and often times her patients lived in nursing homes; which in itself speaks volumes about the families of those patients. Unfortunately, not everyone can be so lucky.
If all departments of the facility do not work together in keeping every part of the facility clean, that can also lead to geriatrics getting sick. This could be from bathrooms, kitchens, bathroom floors, and the residents rooms not being properly sanitized. This can lead to germs and bacteria growth, which can then turn into diseases and infections that the residents can get. The kitchen is a place that most people wouldn’t think would need to be focused on for cleanliness relating to germs being spread. The staff in the kitchen need to be wearing the proper clothing and wear hair nets and gloves at all times. Also, kitchen staff needs to wash their hands as much as the health care givers and keep the kitchen as sanitized and clean as the rest of the facility. Because just like the bathrooms, dinning rooms, bedrooms, and shower rooms; the kitchen is also a breeding ground for