GREENVILLE— At Brookdale Senior Living, the residents do much more than simply live and get by.
The residents of the Assisted Living program are given many opportunities to strengthen their basic needs of purpose, physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual and social.
To strengthen their need for purpose, residents have a chance to participate in a resident counsel, as well as meet with their chef once a month to discuss what food they’d like on the menu.
“They can actually share recipes, and our chef can go in and actually cook those recipes,” said Jamie Welch, Sale and Marketing Director at Brookdale Senior Living. “It’s happened many times. We’ve had a peanut butter pie, and it’s everybody’s favorite. It’s grandma’s recipe.”
The emotional needs of residents are met by allowing residents to still go on outings and trips with family and friends outside of Brookdale. Additionally, residents find solace in music and receive a lot of emotional support from staff.
Physical needs are met at Brookdale by the very popular B-Fit class.
“That class actually got so big out here that they had to rearrange the furniture to fit everybody,” Welch said. “We’ve got a very physically fit community.”
The residents thrive socially with ice cream socials, happy hours and birthday celebrations.
Brookdale allows churches to come in and perform church services, which allows residents to have their spiritual needs met.
Intellectually, Brookdale does brain teasers and activities, as well as tech training.
“Anybody that’s willing to do tech training,” Welch said. “They absolutely love it. Actually, half of our residents are now operating off of iPhones. That’s how popular it is.”
In addition to humans, Brookdale has a few furry residents as well.
“They do allow pets here,” Welch said. “They’ve got three small dogs in the community, and we’ve got three cats in the community as well. Our court yard has been full of bunches of little dogs running around playing with each other, so they still get that pet therapy support.”
The residents of the Memory Care program follow the daily path, which is centered around Dementia and Alzheimer’s. It offers activities throughout the day to better support sleeping habits at night. A popular program offered to Memory Care residents is a computer program called In-Touch.
In-Touch uses algorithms to set residents up with their best person. Families can send personalized messages and photos through the program to residents.
“It works extremely well,” Welch said. “Residents will actually come to us and say, ‘Pull my profile up, because I want to show Marianne over here my daughter.'”
Welch also said when Memory Care residents get agitated from time to time, there are stations around the wing with hobbies and things the residents enjoyed prior to living at Brookdale, like an ironing board, or a tool station, that Welch said helps residents get their mind off of the thing that was agitating them in the moment.
Memory Care is self-supported with its own dining area, kitchen, day-spa, salon. However, Welch said the Assisted Living and Memory Care residents do intermingle a couple of times a month.
The Brookdale mission is to enrich the lives of those they serve with compassion, respect, excellence and integrity. To Welch, that statement is very powerful.
“‘Enriching the lives of those we serve,’ that is the main primary statement there,” she said. “That is the whole reason why I got into this field to begin with. When I started as a direct caregiver, as a STNA, at the floor then slowly worked my way up, that’s what drives me every single day to wake up, get out of bed and know I made a change in somebody’s life that’s for the positive. Helping people navigate life, and this is essentially end of life, but making those last stages of life as enjoyable as we can possibly make it.”
Brookdale Senior Living has 720 locations nationwide. Locally, Brookdale is at located at 1401 N. Broadway St., Greenville, Ohio, 45331. For more information go to www.brookdale.com/en/communities/brookdale-greenville-oh.html.
