Interview with Granville Gardens - Verve Senior Living family member, Denise Foster

I think there are a couple of portions to that. The first one is the services that they provide.

My mom has dementia. Prior to going to Granville Gardens, she really wasn’t getting out much. She wasn’t motivated to be connected to other people. She wasn’t taking part in any activities in her community. She had a lot of issues related to pain in her knees and pain in her hips. Even if it was suggested that maybe she get out for a short walk or an activity, she just wasn’t motivated to do any of that.

When she moved into Granville Gardens about two years ago, I felt that she would probably get worse quite quickly because of her lack of wanting to socialize and be connected to people. But what’s happened is the exact opposite.

She’s thrived there. I think it’s the motivation of the staff, whether it be to come down to exercise classes. If somebody had told me my mom would be going to yoga, even if it’s in a chair and she’s just moving her arms around, I would have said there’s no way my mom would even participate in that. But she loves all the activities there.

She’s made new friends there. She loves the food. She loves socializing with groups. The staff has told me she participates in everything. So she’s come sort of full circle since she’s been there.

With COVID, initially, obviously, myself and other family members were quite concerned about how she was going to do with not having any connection to outside people because they went from initially being confined to your room, where you couldn’t even socialize with the other residents, to slowly opening things up within Granville Gardens. But it got to a point where we could get back there. I thought this one-year period of having very little connection was going to be difficult.

But the best thing about it has been that they have not had a case of COVID within the facility. There has been no scares, no outbreaks amongst the residents or the staff. So all of the protocols that they implemented there obviously were for a reason, and they did a fantastic job of it because there have been no issues related to the virus within the facility.

The activity directors have just been fantastic. I think part of it is what they organize, and part of it is the motivation for my mom to participate. There’s also the wellness team director, Christopher, who has just been wonderful. It’s like for me and other family members to connect and stay on top of what’s happening with her and what’s going on. They’re always quick to answer questions. Whoever’s at reception, Pamela has always been so friendly. Everybody’s very friendly and happy to answer questions.

Donna, who would be the marketing manager, was the very first person that we met. So for us, Donna was like the face of Granville Gardens when we were making a decision for my mom to be there. There’s just been a lot of people. Everybody in the dining room is just fantastic. My mom’s big thing is that she always says she just loves the food.

There have been opportunities when I could go for what would be called the Friday afternoon ice cream social or the Friday afternoon happy hour. I can go and order a glass of wine and sit with my mom while all the other residents were gathered in the lobby, and they would have someone singing and playing piano. It was all songs that the residents knew, and the residents would get up and sing along with the woman who was leading the piano session. Those types of things have brought my mom out. It made her connect with people.

The building is great. It’s situated in a really nice area, so when their little walking group goes out for a walk outside, it’s very treed. There’s a lot of open space. The lobby is nicely furnished with nice comfortable furniture. There’s a little fireplace. It makes it very inviting in the wintertime. That’s the large central area in the lobby, and then the dining room is off of that. It’s very nicely set up. There’s a big window with always lots of bright sunlight coming in. You can see the trees outside.

There’s a nice little courtyard area that looks comfortable, with lounge-type chairs and patio furniture. It’s really comfortable for residents to go sit outside. There’s a small bistro area as well that the residents can go to and choose whatever they want from the fridge if they just want a little snack, or make themselves a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. That’s something my mum has appreciated. 

I’ve also really appreciated it, because it gets her out of her room. If she wants to, she knows that she can go down there and make herself a cup of tea, and she might run into a friend and sit with them and enjoy it with them instead of sitting in her room having a cup of tea by herself. Off that bistro, there’s also another little patio area with little chairs and tables to sit outside on a nice day. There isn’t really a pub, but there is a room that has a bar-like setting with a big TV screen that they’ll have movies in sometimes. There’s a couple of activity rooms, one quite large where bingo would take place, and then another one that’s more of an art room where they’ll do little art classes or where the knitting group meets. 

These small-group things that happen there [are so great for her.] On Friday, they posted on social media that they had a singer, and I believe someone playing guitar set up outside in a covered area, so all the residents could be outside listening to music again. My mom really likes music. She loved it when kids came and did little concerts. She still talks about Halloween, when kids came in their Halloween costumes, and she just loved seeing little kids in their costumes.

It’s improved a great deal. My father would take my mom out to go places, and he would drop her at the door so she didn’t have to walk. She was not interested in going to Bingo with her sisters or those types of things. She always complained of aches and pains and things that were preventing her from doing things.

But since she’s been at Granville Gardens, according to the staff there, she participates in everything. Even if it’s just to go sit and watch other people do things, she has to leave her room, walk down a fairly long hallway, go down an elevator, and then get to where the activity is taking place. Even that amount of activity, just walking in the hallways, is more than she had ever done. My mom’s physical ability is much better than a lot of other residents who are using walkers and whatnot, because my mom doesn’t require any of those aids yet.

I think her life has improved a lot since she’s been there. It certainly wasn’t what I anticipated. I thought that by moving out of her own home and going to a facility, she would potentially deteriorate. So it’s had the exact opposite effect. I would describe the character as caring and friendly.

I feel a sense of relief because I know she’s well looked after. I know there’s somebody always around. My mother gets her medications administered to her, and that happens at least three times a day. So I know that she’s in the dining room three times a day. She’s getting her medications three times a day.

There’s somebody physically with their eyes on her at least six times a day, and more often, because she’s going to activities that are interspersed between all of that. They know that if she doesn’t show up for something, she’s going to get a phone call, or somebody is going to go to her room. So I feel like I don’t have to worry about what’s going on with her on a daily basis. It’s definitely a sense of relief and a real stress reducer for me.

Sometimes she’ll be doing an activity, and I’ve come to just drop off something that she needs, and she’s quite happy to just continue doing her activity. “Oh, by all means, please take my key to my room, and you can just go drop that off because I’m busy here having fun.”

I would say don’t hesitate for a second to make the decision for them to be there. In my opinion, it’s been nothing but perfect and wonderful at Granville Gardens.

We needed somewhere quite quickly for my mom to go because her dementia was getting to the point where she couldn’t stay at home with my father. It was within the hospital system, actually, that they were trying to find placement for her, and it was a bit of a scramble. She stayed with me for a couple of nights, and where I am was not appropriate for my mother.

One of the places that was recommended was Granville Gardens. There were a couple of other recommendations that were both extremely expensive. So we went to Granville Gardens, we spoke to the marketing manager there, and we got a tour and were provided with all the information we needed.

Our intention was that my mom would live there for a month on just a trial basis, and we would see how it went. So we really did no other investigation into any other facility. It was just kind of, we needed her to be somewhere, and then we were going to start looking around and make a decision. But it became apparent quite quickly that Granville Gardens was exactly what my mom needed, and we didn’t need to look anywhere else.

It’s two years later, and she’s still there. It wasn’t initially that we sought out to find something, and that was our choice. It was this place that we thought was going to be temporary until we could find something. I’m just so glad it worked out the way it did.

Initially, the thing that really stood out was that it was such a pretty-looking facility. It felt quite new. It was very clean.

We thought this was going to be temporary, so I wasn’t really looking for anything specific that was going to make my decision, but I certainly didn’t walk in and have any reservations at first glance as to whether this might be a good place to be. It just felt good from the minute we walked in the door.

I think it was within the first week of her being there that we realized this was going to work. I initially thought, "How on earth is my mom going to be able to do this? She’s not going to remember where the dining room is. How is she going to walk out the door, get down the hallway, get down an elevator, and get to the dining room?" Initially, she had an escort who would assist her, and now she does that on her own.

For our family and the decision for my mom, this was basically through the hospital system staff, their social workers, and whatnot, providing us with a list of places. One of the suggestions was Granville Gardens. I honestly think that there probably needs to be a little bit more access to lists and information and websites, and where do I go to see different facilities, what they provide, and what the costs are. I think we lucked in, but I think it’s difficult to find the information that you need.

Sometimes, within your health region, there are numbers that you can call for specific regions. Something like that for us at the time would have been helpful. There’s a lot of work, I think, that families need to do for themselves.

To have an organization that can help navigate and do the work for you to some degree, that would have been very helpful. As I say, I think we just lucked in with the way this fell into place.

The move-in was completely slick.

My mom’s suite that she lives in is just a studio suite, so that’s what was available at the time. It was set up as one of their show suites. So it actually had a bed, a television, and a lot of things in it that they just said you can keep, these few items. If you would like to purchase a couple of the items that are already in the room, they gave them to us at an extremely low rate.

So we moved very little in. There was a lot that was provided in the room. I’m assuming that’s not always the case, but it was this small studio-sized show suite. We brought very little. It was a suitcase of clothes and, over time, a few other things that she needed. But getting her there was fantastic.

One of the things that I was concerned about when she moved in was just all of a sudden leaving her alone in a place that she was unfamiliar with. So I had said, "Can I stay there?" They said that if that was something I really felt that I needed to do, I could do that, whether it would have been in a separate room for a night or in her room.

But then I got to thinking, I’m so close in proximity to get there. If there’s something and she’s worried and needs something, I can just go. I thought I just had to kind of bite the bullet. But that was what was offered. I could see somebody from out of town, if they wanted to stay for a period of time, there were empty suites that weren’t being used or whatnot. I didn’t take them up on that option.

One of the things with her was that she wanted to be out of her own home. She just didn’t want to be there anymore. She needed to be somewhere else. I’m very surprised at how the transition just was so perfect.

Not a thing. I wouldn’t do anything differently.

The only thing I might change is that I would have anticipated the need for her to be somewhere earlier and maybe had places in mind where she would be comfortable and where the family would be comfortable. But even if I had done that legwork, or other family members had done that legwork, we might not have found Granville Gardens. The way it happened, I think it happened that way for a reason.

When you’re kind of scrambling to find something, usually, if you’re scrambling to find something, you don’t find what you’re looking for because you really don’t know what you’re looking for. But we found what we were looking for.