This transcript is not verbatim. It’s been slightly modified (primarily removing “ands” before the beginning of sentences) to be more concise.
Assisted Living Home Story: Fostering Humanity and Community
Assisted Living Home Story
I’d like to tell you a little story about how happy changes happen when people have a concern or passion or just a desire to make things different. My father was a very proud man, and unfortunately had to go into a nursing home. While he was there, um, [he] was pretty much confined to bed. He had not much stimulation of any kind at all, nor did anybody else there. It was definitely a facility that was for care, and what staff thought of was “comfortable,” which meant nothing was happening and everyone was quiet.
Well, I was disturbed about that because I was living in another state and I had no opportunity to really interact with the people there on a regular basis and I had no way I felt to protect my dad from living a life of absolute sadness and depression. So since I had had some experience in working with people and groups and with older people and younger people and in-between people, I thought that I could help by making some changes in his environment and that was the best that I could do in the short-term and in the long-term.
So I devised a plan where I talked to the director of nurses who was having trouble with people being irritable and cranky and so on to make people feel better in the environment. I asked her based on my credentials and other discussions of whether I could provide that for the people and the staff in the nursing home, and therefore to the patients. She told me that she didn’t have the money to do anything like that, andI decided during the bargain with her, which was for me to do the training for a month and then do some follow-up visits when I came to see my dad. Her job would be to manage from the nursing perspective in order that it be done but in a way that people wanted to do it.
So we started with a group of volunteers from the staff and she gave them perks; they could arrange their schedules, [and] they could do other things that would make them sort of special privileges. She’d also agree to give them overtime while they listen to people and in their talking and the project was to be to help the staff have a different view of the people that they were working with and living with and so on, and that meant to have humanity in both directions. The staff would like the people better and would understand them better and not see them with decrepit old people but would see them as people who were vibrant people in another life and were simply at the end of their life. For the patients to see that the staff really could care about them and knew them and respected them.
The Project
So we began by having the staff learn some interviewing techniques so that they had people tell their stories and with permission from families and patients we put up stories on the outside wall along with their pictures of them during the time of their life when the story was being told. This resulted in all kinds of merry little conversations and happiness and people participating in other kinds of activities. Some of them were as simple as going into the dining room and visiting others and play[ing] games. Others were that they began to do social things with each other. They elected the king and queen in the process of all this so that people could have parties and so on. The process of change was what was really important, though, because it gave purpose and humanity to everybody there, irrespective of their position in the facility. They were no longer really patients; they were no longer really residents. They were no longer really administrators. They were all one as a community.
The Gift of Understanding
One of my very favorite stories about the importance of really understanding what we do with people means the difference between everything in their life. This is the story about a woman who was living in the facility and screaming and screaming and screaming. This was violating every rule in the facility and causing great havoc and nobody could deal with her. So we moved her to the nursing station, which was filled with activity and noise and comings and goings and so on. When we told her story, she told us that she had lived in the mountains in Montana all of her life and she had been a sheepherder. She loved the mountains, and she loved being alone and loved being with nature.
Her daughter felt as her mother was in her failing years and she’d be nearer to her in the city of Phoenix,Arizona, which is loud and full of smog and noise, and her mother didn’t like it. So when her mother came to the nursing home, they put her in a place that was the noisiest possible place in the whole world, and where there was no place to go outside—nothing. So the bargain we made with her was that she could live at the end of the hall and a quiet place and near the door, which led out into a patio (where no one went anyway). She was a happy lady, and eventually she got a dog and the dog became her sheep. And so she lived a happy, independent life there. That’s a nice, nice story, but more than anything, it taught people to listen to what people had to say and what was important to them and how to make a wonderful event for everybody.
Eventually everybody had their own story and everybody had something to say or do that somebody liked,and it made life happy. Pretty soon everybody that came into the facility had their story told and their information put up on the wall. Then the staff told of their story, and pretty soon, they were family; they were family.
Lessons
So, you know, you make changes in small ways. You learn that your passion shouldn’t take over, but you need to do things incrementally, slowly bringing people along with you, deciding what you need to say and how to say it. So when you want to say, “You dumbbell, don’t you realize if you want the woman to stop screaming, you’re going to find out what she’s screaming about?” – not tell her to be quiet, that that’s not a solution. This knowledge is transferable to everything that you do, because you think about it but you must remember that in order to do that, you have to know who you are yourself as a person. If you do not know yourself and you don’t feel confident, which most of us do when we’re young. We don’t have the same kind of comfort you have when you see an 81-year-old lady who worked for 60 years, you know, and has some degree of knowledge, theory, lots of practice, and lots of learning, because learning is a lifelong journey. You have to have a sense of curiosity about why things happen, and you have to be willing to explore.
Humility, Curiosity, and Mindful Communication
The wonderful part about that is because its knowledge that is transferable, it transfers into your own personal life as well. You can say, “Gee, maybe I don’t really know what’s happening with my kids, my mother, my dad, my husband. I don’t know how all of this fits together; I need to find that out.” We need to be able to communicate. Because we learn our early communication skills from our families and in school,and on other places, we tend to carry out the same kind of skill or lack of it, that we had at home. So if we don’t pay attention to making our communication clear, caring, helps to be a little bit suspicious sometimes may even, but curious, yes, very curious about how and why things happen, and curious about how we can do something about them as well. So you know, life is fun and it’s really okay to be human.
