Editorial
On love and diversity in long-term care
Friday, October 20, 2006
When you tape your fingers together, obsure your sight with eye patches or goggles, bungee cord your knees together and are spoken to in gibberish, you get a sense for what it is like have some form of dementia.

When you take time paying attention to the causes of pain, physical or emotional, and track a person’s difficult times you learn how to see the unseen reasons for their pain and agitation. You’ve spent a lot of time learning about the person, you’ve made a personal commitment to them. You are involved.

When you learn that one of the residents you support was a business man and begin addressing him with a degree of formality fitting to his life experience, as Charlene Renkema of Rosebridge Manor did, you’ve paid attention to the whole person. When that resident no longer refuses care you know you’ve made the difference.

When you create entire rooms full of memorabilia designed to bring back memories and stir up familiar and comforting emotions, you’ve demonstrated again that you care.
It was the staff at Willows that came to love and care for Bob Beatie deeply enough that they did what nobody else was there to do when Bob died earlier this month. Bob had no other family than the one he acquired during his time at Willows. It was Willows that ensured he was respected, and loved even in death.

Then there is the man who had been living in an institution for decades. With the support of community agenices the man, who has an intellectual disability, was integrated into long term care at OMNI’s Forest Hill in Kanata.
In the same way OMNI homes work hard at understanding residents as whole people and then supporting them in the ways that suit the resident best, Forest Hill made adjustments to accommodate the man’s very unique personal history.

It’s been said that the first duty of love is to listen. And there is no shortage of listening going on in OMNI homes.

OMNI’s approach to care, Supportive Measures is about listening in the most intense ways. Whether it is stepping into the shoes of a resident with dementia, delving into someone’s personal history and preferences, working across sectors to get the right thing done, or seeing to the final farewell to a resident without family, the love runs deep.

It’s because it runs so deep that people with such a diversity of support needs can find the care they need in OMNI homes. When the starting point is to listen and pay attention to each person as whole and unique something bigger is at work.

Love the person first, listen carefully, pay attention, then provide the appropriate Supportive Measures. Both the motivation and the method come together to create what might be universally suitable way to provide care in all kinds of situations.

We love you, and we support you. It’d be hard to go too far wrong from there.