Ivy Sheward’s CBSL Blog #1- Pioneer Lodge Care Home

My initial impressions of the care home weren’t really first impressions. My Grandmother lived there until she passed away a few years ago. The home is broken into three parts: short term intensive care, long term intensive care (which are in the same building) and long term housing with minimal care (that are like apartments for the residents to live independently).

I mostly work with and around residents in the main building for short term and long term intensive care. There are a lot of important rules to remember when you are volunteering, such as never lift a resident, never feed the resident anything unless you’e been told to by a nurse, etc. It is a pretty stressful place when a resident falls (this happened during my orientation) and it is amazing to see everyone jump into action. I’m nervous to be left with some residents because some of them require so much help and I worry I could do the wrong thing.

My first experience was phoning resident’s families to invite them to our Fall Tea this week. That took me about 3 hours. My next two hours were spent having music time with the residents. Before music time, I read to a group of 20-ish residents from a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. We had some exercise time next, which was basically wiggling our toes and getting our hands in the air. Finally, we went through a song book full of lyrics that the residents knew and then helped them back to their rooms.

In my remaining time at the care home, I will spilt my hours evenly between activities with the residents (I am a volunteer in the recreation department) and finishing the resident’s “All About Me’s” which are forms outside their rooms that visitors can read to find something to discuss with the residents.

Connections I can make to the care home are:

1. Some of the residents obviously remind me of my grandparents. There is a huge range of physical and cognitive abilities that impact my socialization with them.

2. There are students in my pre-internship placement that behave a lot like some of the residents in the care home. I find that there are certain ‘classroom management’ techniques that I can use in both scenarios.