I was honored to be invited to write a guest article for the “Together In This” blog. Please check it out here.
What other suggestions do you have to help ease the transition to a memory care unit?
Let’s Be A Positive Voice For Nursing Homes
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As you can probably guess, I spend a significant amount of time scouring the Internet, looking for new ideas for my blog. So it saddens me greatly when most articles I find about nursing homes focus on abuse, neglect, and lawsuits.
Yes, terrible things have happened in some nursing homes. This is not okay, and these situations need to be corrected.
What the public rarely realizes, however, is that there are many, many excellent nursing homes out there. They employ compassionate, devoted staff who work hard to provide top-notch care for their residents.
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How Old Is Too Old To Be An Organ Donor
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Several years ago, when I worked at the nursing home, one of our residents asked for information on how he could become an organ donor. I must confess that I wrongly assumed he was too old. Thankfully, one of our social workers put him and his wife in contact with someone from an organ donation organization. When he died two years later, he was able to donate bone tissue to improve the lives of other people.
Like me, most people believe there is a cut-off age where a person can no longer become an organ donor after death. In reality, they base the ability to donate on medical criteria & not on age. (The oldest recorded donor I could find was a 92-year-old man. After dying of a brain hemorrhage, his liver was donated to a 69-year-old woman.) It’s important to remember, too, that even though some of a person’s organs may not be healthy enough to donate, they may have other tissues (such as bone or corneas) that are usable.
Volunteers Can Burn Out, Too
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We’ve seen a lot in the media recently about the risk of burnout among healthcare professionals. Yet, we sometimes forget that volunteers are vulnerable to burnout, too.
Volunteers interact with residents experiencing pain, people who are dying, residents with challenging behaviors, and families who are hurting. Besides what they experience at the nursing home, volunteers may also develop stressful issues in their personal lives that compound their risk of burnout.
A regular employee receives a paycheck as a motivation for them to address burnout and stick with their job. A volunteer may find it easier to simply call it quits. Today let’s look at burnout from both the perspective of the volunteer and also the volunteer’s supervisor. After all, we need to find a way to keep those priceless volunteers!
Make A Difference Day
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Did you know that Make a Difference Day is coming up on October 26? On this day, volunteers around the world join together to improve the lives of other people.
I bet you think this article will be about how you can go to your local nursing home and improve the lives of the residents. Nope. This article is about how nursing home residents can join together to improve the lives of other people. As I’ve mentioned before, nursing home residents receive a lot of care, but they appreciate opportunities that allow them to give care to others, too.