Home can be defined as an environment offering security, stability and happiness.
At Adelaide Place, it’s all there for you — the comfort of being in your own space, going at your own pace and being among friends.
With the baby boomer generation continuing to age across Canada, there is an increasing demand for quality retirement facilities where they can settle. Adelaide Place may just be the answer. Adelaide Place is currently managed by Greenwood Retirement Communities, which has a growing presence in Southern Ontario, specifically in Lindsay, Peterborough, Hamilton, Toronto, and soon-to-be Oshawa. While Greenwood has only been in operation for three years, the mandate remains to stay focused on providing the highest quality services for their residents.
Kyle Cotton, Executive Director of Adelaide Place explains: “One of the biggest goals is that resident approval would be our greatest reward.”
By growing slowly and steadily, Adelaide Place won’t lose their focus on providing the best quality support for residents. To do this, Cotton says: “We continue to surround ourselves with the best people, having a highly-skilled workforce, which will allow us the opportunity to provide high quality service as well.”
This resident-centric focus aligns with growing trends in the field to take into consideration quality, transparency and accountability. An extra effort has been on accountability. “Providers need to be accountable to the services they provide within the organization,” says Cotton.
Ensuring quality, transparency, and accountability have helped Adelaide Place to maintain the integrity of its services. The key to these goals is effective communication. “In order to get to know the residents, you have to be able to communicate with them, right from the time they enter our facility for their first tour. We ask them very general questions and get to know them on a personal level. Once they’re a resident, we will look through a very focused admission package attaining information related to health, their personal history, their likes and dislikes,” says Cotton. A care package is then built around that particular individual to tailor it their specific needs. Cotton adds that one of the philosophies of Greenwood is that it’s a place where the residents will have their needs met.
“We basically listen to and respond to our residents by offering them tailored solutions to meet their desires,” he says.
Adelaide Place is equipped to address any challenges too. Because residents come from various backgrounds, Adelaide Place is able to resource the community to ensure the needs of its residents are met in order to establish maximum comfort. For example, language barriers can be addressed easily.
“We have staff who are fluent in particular dialects through our community care access centre. We offer the resource of a translator if there was a language barrier,” explains Cotton. These types of effective strategies create a space of inclusion and add to the home factor of the facilities.
With Greenwood specifically, residents are given the choice to define their care in their own way. For example, residents can bring their pets and decorate their rooms with their own furniture and personal accessories. “Defining your own way” is a huge part of Greenwood’s philosophy, and residents are also given access to professional services if they are needed.
Residents are provided access to professional services through personal support workers, nurses, and occupational and physical therapy facilities. Cotton notes that over the past few years the resident population has changed dramatically in retirement homes to include a very broad population that require specific needs and care. “A number of residents will be very independent and then we have the other side of the coin where a lot of residents are very complicated care-wise and require a number of services and support,” Cotton says. He also goes on to say that the retirement home industry is changing in such a way that a lot of case coordination is needed, which includes engaging families and engaging residents. “It’s to the point where the care levels are exceeding what was normally delivered,” he says. And you can be sure Adelaide Place will exceed these care levels with its unique approach to resident care.
The future looks promising for Adelaide Place and Greenwood. With a growing presence in southern Ontario, there are plans to open a new retirement facility in Oshawa. As with the other sites, the Oshawa location will be more than a facility — it will be a home. The Greenwood website sums up their philosophy on the idea of “home”: “We know it is a difficult decision to leave your home. At Greenwood Retirement Communities we believe that a home is not just where you live, but where you feel understood.”
– Sanjay Mathuria
