Paying attention to residents’ cultural needs and innovative, attentive staff make for a winning combination
How did Yee Hong build a better nursing home? In addition to focusing on their residents’ cultural needs, its staff is constantly experimenting with projects that target specific health indicators, searching for improved care.
“We don’t actually use the provincial average as a benchmark,” said Susan Griffin Thomas, Yee Hong Mississauga’s director of care. “If we did, we’d all sit back and say, ‘Oh, our job is done here.’”
Instead, they look to other facilities that perform well in certain categories and try to figure out their best practices. This has resulted in measurable improvements in three indicators of overall health: weight loss, depression and fall rates.
WEIGHT: 6.7 per cent of residents in mainstream Ontario nursing homes experienced weight loss between April and June of last year, compared with 2.55 per cent at Yee Hong’s locations.
That can be largely attributed to the fact that most residents enjoy what they eat, routinely consuming three meals a day.
“Most of our residents when they’re admitted gain weight. They may have been home, isolated, or in a home where they didn’t have food preferences met,” Ms. Griffin Thomas explained. “When you offer a Chinese senior a baked potato for supper, it’s not what they want. They want congee for breakfast, rice for lunch and dinner.”
Sharon Koehn, a research associate at Providence Health’s Centre for Healthy Aging in Vancouver, has prepared reports for B.C.’s Health Ministry on the link between food and well-being among South Asian seniors. She says proper food is usually the top requirement in care when visible minorities check out homes for their parents.
“It’s very unsettling to be in a place where you simply cannot get psychologically, emotionally, the things that comfort you most. For some groups, it is so strongly embedded in their culture and their religion that they will not eat rather than have something [culturally inappropriate].”
All the food prepared at Yee Hong goes through rigorous taste-testing and review before it makes it onto the menu, and no cultural detail is overlooked. Hours before meal time at Yee Hong Mississauga, water is boiled and set aside and milk bags are heated in a hot water bath, to ensure both will be optimum temperature. Cold beverages are bad for “chi” – the sense of inner balance and body temperature.
DEPRESSION: 25.1 per cent of Ontario’s nursing home residents reported worsened mood from symptoms of depression after admission. At Yee Hong, the average is 3.35 per cent.
Staff credit the culturally focused programming and the simple fact that residents can comfortably communicate with staff and other seniors. In mainstream care, visible minority seniors often grapple with social isolation.
“When you transition into a place where there is absolutely no familiarity of language and we talk about the environment being very sterile and not a warm environment, this is why you see a rapid decline in mental health in older ethnic minority adults,” said Karen Kobayashi, a sociologist and research affiliate at the University of Victoria’s Centre on Aging.
Yiu Kuen Chen, 100, remembers the language barrier of the mainstream homes he lived in before he was transferred to Yee Hong.
“The simple [English] words I had no problem with ... but they ignore you,” he said. At Yee Hong, he continued, “We’re living here like a family.”
Siu Tin Ho, 87, spent 10 days in hospital more than a year ago, after a knee operation. When she was released, she moved into Yee Hong’s Mississauga location, where her husband already lived. With a network of peers and regular schedule of social programming, such as a Chinese reminiscence group and cooking classes, living at a nursing home is much better than the monotony of being cooped up in the house. “I don’t want to live with my children,” she said.
