Interview with Carp Commons Retirement Village - Verve Senior Living management, Chris Bishop

Carp Commons is all about people. It’s about building relationships. That’s really what it’s all about. Whether it’s with the families, the residents, with the staff, being genuine, being honest, connecting with people, that builds trust. 

When you have trust with your residents and trust with the families that are coming to Carp Commons to visit their loved ones, it just goes so far. The little things I really push for them to connect with me on and tell me so I can solve them. But when they trust you, it just goes so far. 

We see people come with so much uncertainty about what they’re getting themselves into. I don’t think anyone has a plan: “I can’t wait to live in a retirement home.” It’s something that happens. But we see them change what they think about the place. And we grow with them and learn more about them and strengthen that relationship over time.

I’m a hospitality professional, so that’s a Bachelor of Commerce in Hotel and Food or Tourism. I started in restaurants and then hotels, then I got into student housing. I worked in universities managing student residence buildings and then sections of the university as well that supported those students.

Eventually, I got into seniors’ homes when they ended up opening one almost in my own backyard. I’m a resident of Carp. I have a 10-minute drive instead of an hour and a half drive to get downtown Ottawa.

With my hospitality background, that’s something that changes how we run Carp Commons. It’s more personally focused on the residents rather than running more as a hotel or a resort for seniors, rather than running as a hospital or just a care facility.

Carp is a charming little village, about 10 minutes from Kanata and 10 minutes from Stittsville, which are the suburbs in the west end of Ottawa. We’ve got a microbrewery, we’ve got a post office, we’ve got a liquor store, we’ve got a bakery, a couple places to get your hair cut, and some local churches. It’s home to one of the greatest small fairs in Canada, the Carp Fair, every year.

Saturday there’s a farmers’ market, which is just a walk across the street for our residents. But we try to get everybody really involved locally. There’s a fire department right across the street. It’s only about 2,000 people in Carp.  

So Carp Commons is away from everything, but we’re only 10 minutes from everything that you need. If people really want to be in the hustle and bustle of things, I have to be honest, this isn’t the place for you.

If you like country living meets modern elegance, Carp Commons is a new building, built in March 2019. Everything is state-of-the-art. The rooms are beautiful, with great views of the Ottawa Valley. You're not just a resident in a building, you become a part of the community, and that’s what we really try to promote.

In a smaller community, it seems like everyone knows everyone. That’s what we kind of try to emulate at Carp Commons. So, what’s going on in town? Is there a new vendor at the market? The Carp Fair is coming up, or they’ve got drive-in bingo that we try to get people to get more involved in community events like that. 

When I buy beer, we’ve got a pub and bistro here. We’ve got a new local brewery called Ridgerock. I only serve Ridgerock. When it comes to vodka at our bar, if someone’s having a drink, I’m going to order from the Ottawa Valley or somewhere close by, which is Perth. It’s an amazing agricultural community.

Our chef is fantastic, he’s local as well, as are all of our staff. So that keeps things small, but our chef tries to buy local. There’s some really great corn that comes from the area, and this year is a fantastic year for that.

We keep everything small, keep everything local, a little bit more casual. We’re not from the city. We’re from the country. We try to connect as individuals. So I dress down a little bit, rather than a jacket and a tie. Now, don’t get me wrong, if there’s a formal event, I’ll get dressed up! But you kind of match what’s going on in the community, what’s going on with our residents and how they feel about living. It sounds like the residents of Carp Commons Retirement Village are their own community, but that their community is very much tied to the larger community of Carp as a town.

The local school comes over and does some concerts. We’ve got some pen pals. We all go to a Remembrance Day ceremony together as a community. Our residents are over there, and the local school’s over there at the local cenotaph on Remembrance Day, which is a nice event to see.

When kids come to the building or when we go to events like that as a seniors' community, you really see the energy of those kids kind of perk up the seniors and all of our residents. They take on the energy that those kids bring to the environment. 

I think our biggest difference and biggest competitive advantage is our food. I have a chef here, not a cook. My chef, Matthew Brearley, comes from the Arnprior area, which is even more into the Ottawa Valley.

He used to own his own restaurant there, Castlegarth in White Lake, and he comes from a farming family. His restaurant was kind of critically acclaimed in the Ottawa area. People would drive from all around Ottawa, an hour out to White Lake, to have dinner there. 

He’s a Red Seal chef. When he had his restaurant, he would go into the back, and if he had the salad on the menu, someone would order the salad; he’d pick the lettuce and pluck the tomato, and you were getting fresh food from farm to fork, literally. He’s tried to bring that same thing to Carp Commons. When I hired him, he said, "I’m not making meat and potatoes for your residents. That’s not what I’m going to do. I’m going to open up their taste buds, they’re going to try things that they’ve never had, that they’ve never tried before."

When I talk to people who are touring, they say, "My mom and dad are sick and tired of getting wieners and beans." Well, why don’t you have a look at our menu here? Whether it’s an egg Benedict on a Sunday morning, or he actually smokes trout and salmon in our kitchen. Today for lunch, I actually had a lobster roll. The soups are phenomenal. So my problem is I’m getting a little bit heavier because I have to taste the food every day.

We’ve had some big events, and the big events he does, our chef likes the amuse-bouche, and he likes the little finger foods where people can try a lot of things. I’m a big seafood fan, so anytime he’s doing lobster, that’s my dying day food. We had lobster rolls today, which were amazing.

The desserts are all made locally. It’s just a different way of cooking where, rather than buying a bag of chicken fingers for our bistro, he actually cuts apart the chicken and uses the carcass for his soups to create a stock. He’ll take that fresh chicken breast and have it for dinner later in the week, and he’ll cut little chicken fingers out of pieces of the chicken. He’ll roll them and bread them and make them like real chicken fingers rather than getting something out of a freezer. 

Food is three times a day, where every person comes down to the dining room, and they have three different meals with us. If you give someone a bad meal and make them upset, they might be upset for the next meal. It’ll stick with them.  

Having a variety is key rather than having beef on three straight nights or lunch and dinner on back-to-back days. We also talk to our residents about what they like and what they don’t like.

They did have to twist the chef’s arm to do barbecued hot dogs in the summertime, and he actually did them. Even then, he made homemade mustards and aioli and things that were above and beyond to make it a little bit more special. That’s really what I would stand behind at Carp Commons.

We’ve got an amazing life enrichment program as well, and everything comes back to what does the individual want. If we have a bunch of people here that like to go walking, then we’re not going to stick them in an art class. We’re going to listen to what they want, and then we’re going to cancel the art classes and focus more on the outdoor physical fitness stuff.

We’ve also got a great art class. Lots of people go. We take the time to find out who they are as people, what they’ve done in their past.

Just because you’re older doesn’t mean that you can’t change and learn new things. When you were younger, you had new friends and new experiences and new activities, and tasting new foods were exciting things that you wanted to do. Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you can’t have excitement in your life. 

We’ve got a nutritional profile for every resident. Because Carp Commons is new, we’ve got a lot of new technologies in place. So when you come for dinner, we’re going to have a picture of the food, and you’ll see it on the iPad. There will be two options for you to choose from at lunch or dinner. You’ll have a look and say, "Would you like this or this?"

When we come to the table, the iPad pulls up your name, and it’s going to tell us anything that you have in your profile that you can’t have. Servers will know that Mrs. Brown can't have this item because it’s full of something that she’s allergic to.

We also do à la carte. Although we have a limited or kind of a table d’hôte menu where you choose one of several options for a main course. If you were to say, “Liver and onions tonight or pork," and you don’t really like either of those, you can ask for  something different. We have a side menu. You can always get some comfort foods from the à la carte menu.

That’s how we run everything. Our managers, including me, know every resident. I know most of their families quite well, too, and speak with my residents on a regular basis.

We have monthly meetings where it’s kind of an open forum, and we have suggestion boxes around that we clean out every month and bring those suggestions to the table at those meetings. If there's something that they want to do, they let us know. and we find out a way to do it. If you’ve got a great idea and it works, we don’t say no. 

We're not selling a product, we’re selling a whole lifestyle. So we want to understand each person's needs. When you come in for a tour, we don’t just walk the building and show you all of our amenities. We sit down first, whether it’s on the phone or here, we ask some questions to the family and some questions directly to the residents. "What did you do as a job?" and those kinds of things.

Recently, we had someone move in, and I found out that the gentleman was a pilot. I know that I’ve got two other pilots living in Carp Commons. You kind of roll with that and say, "Well, actually, we’ve got some people that I think you’re really going to fit in with." The faster you can connect them with some other residents and make them feel at home or comfortable with the people around them, the better it is.

Some people play bridge. We’ll go over here to the library, and they’ve got a bridge club on today. Then they say, "Wow, I could get involved in this."

Our community really loves puzzles. That’s a great way for people to get together. You’re kind of doing something not too cognitively challenging, but a great thing. We have our puzzles even around our bistro. People will be having a glass of wine and fighting over, we’ve got to find that last brown piece with the blue flag on it. I find myself getting involved and stuck into some of those puzzle challenges sometimes, too.

The commonality in our community is the area of West Carleton, which is the west end of Ottawa. There’s always a connection to Carp or the area. We've actually got three people from Vancouver Island, but their families live here and know about us.

But there are some people that are here just because of the food.

I’ve actually had people move in just because of my Life Enrichment, my Activities Manager, because they were with her at another home and they loved her so much and they heard she was leaving and they said, “Where are you going?” She started talking about it and they said, “Well, we’re coming too.”

The staff is very local as well. I think everything comes back to being this little, elegant country town, where things are a little bit slower and calmer paced, and the lifestyle is a little bit different than living in the city or living in the suburbs. You have to like that. I try to hire my staff locally as much as possible so that they don’t have a long commute and they’re not stuck in traffic and grumpy when they get here. They spend more time with their families and quality time with our residents.

When you’re in a smaller community and you’re living that both at work and outside of work, you have the same concepts of how life works and how it is a little bit slower. If you brought someone from, you know, a big city Type A personality into my building, it doesn’t go all that well because things are just a little bit more casual and slow and relaxed. I think our residents appreciate that and that’s definitely a commonality.

Our building is mostly independent residents. We’ve got 124 suites and we’ve got three levels of care. Our second floor is half assisted living. There are 10 assisted living suites and 11 suites in memory care.

Some people here like that they can move into an independent floor, and it’s basically a senior’s apartment with some friends to meet up with and some card games to play and some movies to watch and a walking group or some art or some music classes, things like that, live entertainment.

A lot of them move into Carp Commons like that, but then they kind of go through this continuum of care, and maybe something happens like a fall or their health declines a bit. They don’t have to leave the building. They can just leave their suite and go down to the second floor and get a little bit more care.

In some cases, we try to promote them staying in their suite as long as they can and keeping their independence to come and go as long as they can. It’s the best thing for them mentally and physically, but sometimes the physical side and even the mental side when it comes to the memory care, fails us. That’s just how life works.

The families love that they can stay at the same place. The consistency of staff and faces that you see is really important to seniors as well. When you have a staff that stays around and connects with their residents, whether they’re in independent, assisted living, or memory care, those are familiar. They become like your family.

We work really closely with the local LHIN, and as soon as they move in, what we try to do is set people up for long-term success. We want to talk with the families and have a conference about, "Okay, here’s where mom and dad are. I think they’re in a good position with health right now, but have you signed up for these things?" My care staff, specifically my health and wellness manager, will say, we want to get you signed up with the LHIN and make sure you’re on the list for long-term care.

A lot of people don’t understand the difference between long-term care and retirement. When they first come to Carp Commons, we’re really pushing that, understanding the services around you. It used to be called CCAC. It’s now called the LHIN. You’ve paid your taxes to have this service available to you. If you apply and can get into long-term care, then you don’t have to pay us to help you with care. I want you to take advantage of every free service that you can to make this as affordable and have you live here as long as you can.

When they get to that spot where they need to go to long-term care, then we really work with the families and the local services to support them, make sure that they’re on the list early so that they don’t have to sign up when they need it and then have to wait for several years to get into the building that they want.

There are a lot of little things like that that we work closely with the family on to make a smooth transition if that’s the case. At the end of the day, that is the worst-case scenario.

We meet on a daily basis, and we get reports from everywhere. A server or a housekeeper might tell us something that they saw of a resident in the hallway that may mean nursing should go up and check with the resident, or maybe set up an appointment with the doctor.

We’ve got some local doctors that come in every Wednesday. You don’t have to go out to these doctor’s appointments all the time because your doctor actually comes to you. Specialist is a different case, but we do have family doctors. As long as you choose to roster with our doctor before you move in, they accept everyone that comes to Carp Commons.

Staying in touch is an open-door policy. 

We’ve got private dining rooms. If there’s a special event, you can bring them in and have a private meal, and our chef will prepare it for you. It’s not all free like it is for the residents, so the visitors would have to pay for dinner, of course.

Our bistro is open. People will come in and watch the hockey game with Dad in the pub and have some beer and nuts or order a pizza through the chef, something like that.

We also invite some of the local community to some of our events, and they get involved. That’s a nice way to have people get to know what we have. They might not be ready for retirement yet, but they just know, oh, maybe it’s not what we thought it was. And just because they’ve come to a couple of classes or a couple of activities and gotten involved with our local community.

There are lots of cases where the decision to move here is challenging, especially when you look at the Carp area. There are a lot of people who say, "I’m going to die on my farm" or something like that. The family just wants what’s best for mom and dad, but it's a challenge to connect with them to show them that this is the best thing. "What’s going to happen if you’re out working on your tractor and you have a heart attack? What’s that going to do to your family? Should you really be out on your tractor when you’re 88 years old?" 

We rely on the family to give us a heads-up on what makes mom or dad tick. How can we approach them with certain things? What should we avoid saying to them?

In other cases, we have the family that comes in and needs us to talk mom and dad into coming to Carp Commons. "We think it’s the best for them, but they’re really stubborn and stuck in their way." It really comes back to connecting personally with each individual, doing things in an individual way.

Verve Senior Living is a smaller company, so it’s not like some of the bigger companies where they’re trying to make the McDonald’s of seniors’ homes. Here, you’re allowed to have your own experience. We match our services with our residents, match our food tastes with them, and use the local things, things that are going to connect with people here. We have that leeway to be able to not just be stuck and follow these tight parameters.

When we put this building up, it took quite a long time, and there was a lot of interest in the community from the residents of Carp. Now the seniors are an active and big part of our community.

They’ve put in an adult fitness park across the street now. It’s like a playground, but it’s for adults, and it’s things to stretch. I think it’s more of a European concept. You can go for about a five-minute walk, and then you get to this park, and you can do your stretching and your yoga poses or just range-of-movement exercises. All of the equipment there is set up to support you and it gives you certain exercises to follow. 

In another example, the residents came to us and said, "We’ve got a great outdoor terrace that’s on one section of the building, but it’s not big enough; we’d like something more." It’s a local ownership that we have, and they really want us to connect to the community as well. So we discussed adding a new outdoor space.

We’ve got a plan, now, and I’m actually working with the residents at Carp Commons on how they want this to look. We’ve got a base plan, but "What kind of flowers do you want here? We’re going to have to take down some trees, but we’re going to add some new ones. What kind of trees do you want?"

The feedback was amazing. I didn’t know that we had all these people who knew about trees and flowers and what kind of birdhouses they wanted to attract the birds that they wanted to watch from their suite windows and things like that. Again, though, we connected with them and asked questions. We’ve got some amazing brains and experience to pull from, and why would I not take advantage of that? 

When you go to a retirement home and tour, I would say make sure you taste the food. I would say, “Can I have what they’re having?” So that you’re not getting some fancy plate that they made just for you to get you in the door, and then when you’re there, you’re going to have wieners and beans.

Make sure you taste the food. That’s huge because you’re going to be in that dining room two or three times a day.

Ask residents when you’re walking around, talk to the residents when you’re doing a tour, and say, "Hey, how do you like it here?" If they don’t answer you, they’re probably not all that happy.

I try to take our tours into the crowds of people where they’re playing games or doing a puzzle or where there’s an art class. They get to see what's happening. And I might say, "Here’s Mary Lou. She’s an amazing artist. This is some of her work from the past, and look at what she’s doing now here." And "This is Susan over here. She couldn’t even draw a stick figure when she first started coming to this class, and look at some of the stuff that she’s done here."

Then they talk about their experience. "Oh my gosh, Stephanie and Brianna are amazing, and they talked me into trying this out, and now it’s the best thing that ever happened to me."

Change is difficult for everyone and even more if you’re a little bit older, but you’ve got to remember what kind of excitement that change can come. Don’t fight it, maybe try to embrace this next step of your life and get the most out of it. If you’re a willing participant in trying to make the best out of it, you’re more likely to get positive results.