Interview with Courtyard Gardens - Verve Senior Living management, Amanda Hill

I get to meet some really great seniors who have interesting stories, history, and life experience, which is really nice. I learn lots of things from the seniors every day at Courtyard Gardens.

I live close to here, so this is in my neighborhood and my community, so that’s really nice. I’m fortunate for that. The people that I work with are a really great team. We have a lot of fun, we work together really well, and it’s a really great atmosphere to come to work.

I’ve been working for the company Verve Senior Living for 18 years. I started out at another home working part-time while my kids were young and just found that working with seniors felt comfortable and right to me. I felt very at home working with seniors. It didn’t feel like work.

I continued and pursued some education in therapeutic recreation and business leadership. I moved to another home, worked there in management, and moved up and expanded my knowledge, and became a general manager about six years ago. Courtyard Gardens is the second home where I’ve been the general manager.

Each home has some different structure, different residents, obviously different services, and I found that in my journey, our company has been very supportive and encouraging for people like myself to learn and gain experience and grow and move up in the company as well.

Courtyard Gardens has a different model for sure than some of the other homes I’ve worked at and some in our neighborhood as well. Part of it is that we offer independent living, so people who want to have an apartment in a seniors residence, but they want to come and go as they feel like. They want to volunteer in the community, they want to go on holidays, they want to have their car, they want to go to the senior centre, all that. That’s great, and we have that here.

We also have assisted living. Sometimes people need a bit more help with some of those daily living activities, maybe with medication, maybe with some mobility assistance. And then we also offer long-term care. All three of those different services and care levels can be provided for at Courtyard Gardens.

Folks can move in at a certain point in their health and their life, and then move within our building and get that extra or additional care as they need it, and they don’t have to move to another place.

The other thing that we have that is a little different is we have private pay. Residents can rent and sign an agreement and pay privately for their accommodation and services. We also have some subsidized apartments through our health authority. So we have some different financial structures as well.

The process really is that the family or the resident connects with the health authority and the home support office or case manager with the health authority, and they go through some needs assessment and some criteria that way. What kind of services do they need? Is it things that we can provide and support at Courtyard Gardens?

The Health Authority works with a resident and their family, or the resident themselves alone, to determine eligibility in the financial piece. Then they work with us. The case manager works with our health and wellness manager to plan, move in, show them a suite, do the assessment, get them on our waitlist, and have them move in, hopefully in a month or two, as demand and supply is available.

It’s really tough to say there’s the same process for everybody because each person’s situation is unique. It’s really important to get to know what that person’s needs are, what their worries are, and how we can overcome the challenges that they’re perceiving.

Things like, "I want to have my dog." Okay, you can have your dog as long as you can look after the dog and walk the dog. Bring the dog, no problem. We want you to have your dog.

Sometimes you hear people say things like, well, they’re all old people there, and they feel like, I don’t want to be one of those old people. But we try to break down the barriers a little bit and really get to what that individual’s needs are and how we can best adapt our services at Courtyard Gardens to meet their needs and work through those barriers.

Sometimes it’s the family who is really kind of driving the inquiry, and sometimes it’s the resident who really has decided, I need, I want, I want to make this change. It depends on who is kind of driving that inquiry, and really taking a lot of time to ask a lot of questions, get to know them, and just really try to ease a lot of the fears that people have about what seniors living might look like.

My own grandparents have these misconceptions! I try to explain to them it’s not that old way of thinking that you’re going there to end your life, your last days, and you stop living. It’s not that at all. There’s a lot of life in our building. We have a lot of great activities. There are a lot of friendships that develop at Courtyard Gardens.

There’s a peer group that some people don’t have when they live in their own apartment. They don’t have that social connection. Here you automatically have 130 neighbours who are all maybe at a similar point as you, who have gone through similar experiences and can provide some peer support.

We are not regimented to the point where you have no choices, and people think that, “Oh, when I move in there, I give up all my independence.” Well, no, actually, we want you to maintain your independence, and we’re just here to try to keep you moving and up and going, keeping that independence as long as that person is able and however that looks for them.

We want to make sure we really allow each resident to be explaining and doing the things that are important to them and that we’re listening to their needs. There’s a lot of activity. There’s a lot of freedom to come and go. If you want to order Skip the Dishes and have dinner brought in, then it’s great. Go for it. If you don’t want to cook, we provide meals. If you feel like going out, go out. It’s not regimented and you don’t lose your independence.

When somebody new moves in, we have ambassadors who are other residents who are sort of the friendly welcoming committee. If a new person moves in on the first floor, we have a couple of people who are ambassadors on the first floor. They will go introduce themselves, knock on that person’s door and say, “Hi, I’m the ambassador. This is where I live. This is my apartment number.”

The ambassadors can help explain some of the things in the first day and first week, take them around for a tour, and actually invite them. Come with me, we’re going to dinner. Why don’t you join me for dinner for a few days? They introduce them to their friends.

The staff also know that somebody new is moving into Courtyard Gardens. As a team, we share that information so everybody knows to introduce themselves, to be on the lookout for that person coming to the dining room who might look a little bit tentative or not sure where to go, and to welcome them in.

The Life Enrichment Department will reach out within the first few days to find out what their history is, what their likes are, what their dislikes are, what kind of activities they used to do, and what kind of things they would like to do now. Then they invite them to some of those programs and activities in the near future.

The dining manager will meet with that new person to say, "Hey, any restrictions or precautions or likes or dislikes with food that we should know about, that we can try to accommodate?" Our health and wellness team will do the same, meet with them, and get that information about their overall health.

If we’re providing assisted living services, then that happens immediately with things like medication or bathing and those kinds of things. Every department connects with that new person within the first week. At minimum, they’re inviting them to programs and they’re introduced to new residents. Residents are introduced to the ambassador, and that ambassador also takes on that person to introduce them to their friends and help them become invited and feel a little more familiar.

Our health and wellness team, and actually the whole team, share information and observations that we see, or if a resident has a concern that they bring forward about their own health care. We’ll work together with that resident so that they have some autonomy in the decision-making of their own health and can be an active participant in decisions about their care.

We also would say to that person, "Can I call your daughter, or should we connect with your son?" and "How about we should maybe have a meeting together?" Maybe they have some other support systems in their life, a friend, or maybe they get support from other care services like mental health or physio. Should we bring those people into the discussion?

We talk about what their goals are as a person living at Courtyard Gardens. What do you want to achieve? How is that working for you? Is there more we could do here? Is there support that can come in that we don’t have in our building? How do we work with all of these partners in your health and your care?

Sometimes we might have to have that conversation with them and their family to say, okay, we’re realizing this person’s care needs are more than we can support in assisted living, and we want to work with you and the family, the resident and the family, to best support that person on the next step.

That then becomes another conversation about where to go next and what services we can do here, or if it’s not here, how can we support you until you have a new plan and answer all of those questions. But it’s really a conversation about what that resident’s needs are, and we try to include all the invested people in that person’s care.

Courtyard Gardens has been operating for 30 years. We have a really solid reputation in the community. Our location is terrific because we’re right in the central Richmond area, very close to a lot of amenities. There’s a great senior centre right across the street. We have a good rapport with the senior centre. A lot of our residents go over there and partake in activities.

We get involved in different community activities like the Walk for Alzheimer’s. We participate in fundraising with our residents for that every year. We’re closely connected to an agency called Richmond Cares Richmond Gives, and we provide some money annually for them for their senior peer counseling program.

We also have a really great partner with a local theatre, Gateway Theatre, and we provide a lot of connections with them for their volunteers. They’re a great partner. We take our residents to their shows. We do different community outreach with them.

It’s really a great neighborhood, and we have access to a ton of services for seniors. We try to connect our residents with those services, and we try to be a very close partner where we see that there’s a good need and a good match. We do participate in all kinds of activities, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, and different things in our neighborhood.

We have a really delicious soup that I love. Every day I have soup. One of the things that I like on the menu at Courtyard Gardens is a curry chicken salad, and that one’s always nice. It’s a kind of summery salad, so that’s great. I love it because I don’t have to cook, so I’m happy with lunch every day. I really love the salads and the soups that I have at lunch.

We work with a team of folks across our company and our dining manager and a dietitian, obviously. We work very hard to provide a variety of choices. We plan ahead about six weeks at a time so we can connect with our suppliers and make sure they have what we need.

Every month, we feature a local item that in our community is fresh and local. This month, our local feature item is apples. In our community here in Vancouver, there are a lot of farms and fresh apples and produce available, so we want to include that in our menu when it’s seasonal and take advantage of the great local produce we have.

We really work hard at Courtyard Gardens to keep the menu changing and keep it fresh. We have different choices every day for lunch and different choices every day for dinner. For the most part, if somebody doesn’t like one item, there’s always another one that they can choose that would be great as well. There’s lots of variety.

The culture at Courtyard Gardens is really caring, and that might sound repetitive, but it’s true. When I talk to the staff about things like, “Why do you like working here?” they answer with, “I really like helping people, and I like knowing that when I go home at the end of the day, I’ve done everything I can to help that person and treat them like I would want my mom or my grandmother treated.”

The values that we live by are things like flexibility. As I mentioned, we want to make sure each resident’s needs are met, and they may not all be the same. So we want to get to know that resident and adapt and be flexible. We don’t want to be rigid and say, “This is the way we’ve done it for 30 years.” We want to adapt and be flexible.

We always look for ways to improve. "How can we do it better?" We check in, get information, and collaborate with the staff and say, well, have you got a suggestion? Have you got an idea? Let’s try it. Maybe there’s a better way we could do this. Maybe there’s a more efficient way. Maybe there’s a more cost-effective way. Maybe there are better outcomes for residents or better outcomes for staff.

We want to be really empathetic to the residents. We know that people are here for different reasons, and we don’t want to forget that they all have their own things going on in their life just like anybody working here does. They might be having a bad day, they might be in a lot of pain, they might be lonely, or they might be worried about somebody in their family.

We're empathetic to their situation and try to provide what they need at that time. We want to work with integrity, and that includes a lot of accreditation and requirements for different agencies that provide oversight, and our own company. If we say we want to do it this way, we want to really stick to our word and be accountable for how we’re delivering those services.

We have a program within our company, like an ideas program, and that’s a way for staff to sort of say, what innovations could we explore for better outcomes? One of our team members had researched a company that helps us plan our activity calendars in a way that we can do it online.

This program connects well with other software systems that we have in the building. It’s a very adaptable program. It would be more cost-effective to use this program, and it allows families to see it online as well. It really had a lot of features that would be great for us.

She submitted her idea, and across our company, ideas are reviewed, and we implemented this program and started using it. We can share knowledge with our other homes and say, "Hey, this has been a really positive change for us, and here’s why, and we think that everybody should switch to this program, or that kind of process."

One of the things we just implemented was that we purchased what’s called a TRIO bike. A TRIO bike is something that comes from Europe, and it’s a style of bike where two seniors can sit in the front, and a staff member can pedal this bike.

We’re excited to be able to take people out, though we typically have a bus that we use for outings and things, too.

But with the TRIO bike, a married couple, for instance, can go out for a bike ride and explore our neighborhood on a bike in a safe way. They don’t have to pedal, and they don’t have to balance, and it’s really a creative way to have a really great outdoor tour, scenic bike ride, and see our neighborhood. It’s easy for the resident. They get to sit back and relax. 

Courtyard Gardens has a long history of providing excellent care, so I’m very confident that that will continue. The people living here will definitely continue to change. For example, we have residents as young as 57 and as old as 102. So their needs and likes and dislikes, it’s almost 50 years of age range. They’re very different. The younger person might really love the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and the older person might really love the Rat Pack and different music. 

We continually look at what’s new and what’s next. What do these residents coming to us want to have? Technology is going to be such a big piece. The next generation of residents is way more connected than the current 80- and 90-year-olds. Not all of them, but some. Being connected to their families virtually instead of son or daughter living in the neighborhood, and how do we help them do that? A lot of that is behind the scenes, infrastructure in place so that they can have that connectivity if they want. That’s going to change for us at Courtyard Gardens.

Other than that, I think it’s just continuing to say that whatever we are today is not going to be the same as we are next year because we will continue to evolve and continue to work on improving processes.

There is one couple here, where one partner was a professional in the community in the field of arthritis and treatment, and so forth. Coming here, he’s been more than happy and willing to tell other residents about using your walker properly, how to improve your balance, demystifying arthritis, and trying to support people with the knowledge that he already has and say, “I want to share this.”

We’re happy to facilitate his volunteering. He loves to share what he knows, and we think that he has knowledge to offer, so we want to provide that outlet for both the people that he’s talking to and for him to have that ability to share his knowledge. He gets some fulfillment out of that, they learn from him, and I would love to see those kinds of things continue.

People come here at different stages of their life, but they all have something to offer. We want to say, what is it that you would love to offer? How can we find a way to give you that outlet or support you to do that to your best ability?

Don't wait until it’s too late. I don’t know what's too late for everybody, of course. When a family member, say a parent, has a health crisis and they’re in the hospital and you’re faced with the reality of, “They’re telling me my mom or dad can’t go back home to their own place and I need to find something now,” that’s a really high-pressure situation for that family. It’s really tough to come to some agreement or terms on what that next step might look like.

Having those conversations before that health crisis is really, really critical. Ask mom or dad, where do you think you’d want to live? Do you know anybody who already lives in a seniors residence? What do they say about it? Is there a neighborhood that you think you really want to be part of? Do you like living by the river? Then maybe you need to have that idea, I want to live by the river, I need to look at these places in that neighborhood. Or I want to be in a central part of the city so I can walk to amenities myself.

Having those conversations in advance and going and looking at different places and asking the people who live at Courtyard Gardens, what do you like about it here? Why did you choose to come here? It’s a big change for a lot of people.

When you move into a building like this, it’s a whole community right there in your building. For some people, that’s a hard adjustment when they’ve lived on their own. Having those conversations ahead of time is so much better than having to make those decisions in a high-pressure crisis situation.

I would say start those conversations with your family while you’re healthy and able and can go out and look at as many as possible. Consider what the cost might be, how long you could afford it, or what you would be able to afford, and neighborhood amenities, all of those pieces.