This term for my community externship I was situated at Broadway Pental Coastal Lodge long term care facility. This facility is a Christian based lodge and has three different floors of elderly living there. When I first started my rotations at the lodge I was extremely nervous and did not enjoy working with the residents. I afriad because of how unpredictable they can be and didn’t know how to react if they became upset with me. I was unsure if I would even be successful at this particular externship, and didn’t know if I’d be able to provide care for the elders at all.<\/p>\n
As the term went on the I slowly began to feel more comfotable around the eldery in terms of providing treatment and communicating with them, until the day I met Larry. He is a 92 year old resident who lives on the third floor of the lodge. He helped me to understand some of the issues that the residents are faced with and a few of the diseases they may be faced with (such as dimentia).<\/p>\n
Larry was more cognitively available than any other elderly I had provided treatment for. He told me that he was lonely and that he just wanted someone to talk to. Each time I visited him to provide dental hygiene treatment I would set aside time to just simply speak with him. I could tell that it was more important to him than the health of his teeth. I learned that he has traveled the entire world over four times and he has quite the sense of humor! After I finished his care I began to develop rapport with the rest of the eldery, if possible, before I provided treatment. It made me feel great because I could tell that most of them really did just want someone to speak to. An elderly lady even told me “it’s great to have such a nice young lady come and talk to me because I get tired of looking at old folk all day”. I actually laughed out loud, but felt great about the fact that in some way, even if it was insignificant, I was providing companionship for a short while to the elders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This term for my community externship I was situated at Broadway Pental Coastal Lodge long term care facility. This facility is a Christian based lodge and has three different floors of elderly living there. When I first started my rotations at the lodge I was extremely nervous and did not enjoy working with the residents. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-professionalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/71"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jcontant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}