Interview with Delmanor Northtown management, Matt Ross

Working with the residents is the obvious answer. We have an unbelievable group of residents, and it is a group that is ever evolving, so we are constantly getting to meet new people. Coming to work, interacting with the residents, helping them, and getting to learn about them is a huge part of why I love what I do.

Working with our employees is just as meaningful. We have such a wonderful group of employees, and dealing and working with them, learning about them and their families, and really becoming one big family for all of us is one of the things I love most about getting up and coming to work.

I also think about the trickle-down effect this experience might have on my own children. I’m a father of three young kids, and I hope that by spending time with me and helping with our residents, they gain a new respect for our senior population and what they have to bring to the table and contribute to all of our lives.

About 12 years ago, I was fully integrated in the music world, and I always wanted to be a father. My wife was pregnant with our first child at the time, and I had missed most of her pregnancy because I was traveling a lot. I got home about a month before our first son, Connor, was born, and that was when I really came to the realization that the travel aspect of music was not appealing anymore.

That helped me move toward figuring out what was next. I was fortunate enough to meet Robin Knezek, who was the general manager at Delmanor Northtown at the time. I was introduced to her through a mutual friend, and this was right when the building was opening. It was an exciting time because Robin and I hit it off, and she hired me as the valet.

As time evolved, she thankfully saw something in me and started handing me more tasks and more responsibilities. I went from the valet to the move-in coordinator, then about a year later I took over managing the dining room, then became the assistant general manager, and in January 2016, I took over as the general manager. I have Robin to thank a lot for me being where I am today, and I’m really grateful that I’ve been able to be at Delmanor Northtown for so long.

What surprised me the most was the ability and the life that our residents really brought to the community. I didn’t grow up with grandparents, so I didn’t have that grandparent experience. I didn’t really understand or realize the energy and the active seniors, and what they could bring to the community and what they could bring to me. That was really the first thing that stood out to me in working with our residents.

What we call the Delmanor Experience is, to me, ultimately about the people. You can have a beautiful building, and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have the right people, if you don’t have the beautiful people that are there to work there. We have an unbelievable team of people who work there.

One of the things that really helps the Delmanor Experience for our residents is the longevity of the team. I was on a phone call just the other day with the returning officer from Elections Canada, and she said I was the only person she had spoken to at any retirement or long-term care home who was still there 10 or 12 years later. It’s not just me. Our whole team has that longevity.

The familiarity that comes from that longevity is so important. It creates a feeling for residents and for prospective residents when they walk into the building. Having people around for so long really helps create that. If there’s one thing, it’s the familiarity, the longevity of our team, and the feeling that people get when they walk into our building.

We’ve always said that we want our community to feel like home because ultimately, when someone makes the decision to move to a retirement community, they are moving into their new home. We want them to feel like this is their home and not the other way around, that it’s someplace that they live where we work.

Creating that home feeling is important for us right from the get-go, greeting people, greeting them by name, and exuding that warmth because that is the first impression. That feeling of home is very important because this will be their home.

One of the first couples that moved in was two wonderful people from England named Alex and Peggy. Getting to know them and understanding their reason for ultimately making the decision to move in was really interesting, and it also helped me understand a little of how people go down the path to make that move. Peggy told me that they had put a lot of thought into it and decided that they wanted to make the move for the one who was left behind. They knew they were not going to live forever, and they wanted to make sure that whoever was left behind would be well cared for.

Many years later, she came to me and said that one important factor in all of that was choosing the right place and choosing the place that they felt comfortable in, and that they definitely felt they had made the right choice. That was really sweet and comforting. It’s one of countless interactions that show how unique residents are and how meaningful their stories can be.

It can be really difficult. Moving at any stage of life is difficult. My advice to everyone is always that it’s important to do your homework, do your research, and shop around. Just like if you’re purchasing a car or a new home, there are options, and when it comes to choosing a retirement community, there are options. Particularly in our neighborhood, there are quite a number of options. A lot of times, different family members have different ideas of where they want their family member to live, so that can be challenging, too.

Everybody is unique! Everybody has unique interests, and everybody has different levels of engagement. We have residents who want to be extremely involved and other residents who aren’t as interested in being involved. In the early days of when someone moves in, taking the time to get to know them, answer their questions, and see what their interests may be helps give us a better idea of how we can integrate them into our community. We have such a diverse group of people with diverse interests. Taking everybody one at a time and integrating in that way is our best approach.

Our community relations managers do an amazing job at learning a lot about these residents before they even move in, which gives us a bit of a head start in knowing what their likes are, what their interests are, and even from a culinary perspective, the types of food they may like or may not like. That way, we can have as much of a tailored approach to them as possible right from the get-go.

The dining and culinary experience in a retirement community is very unique because it’s the one area of the community that gets 100% participation. If we look at any other aspect of the community, whether it’s recreation programming, housekeeping, or excursions, not everybody participates, but everybody eats. Therefore, we get 100% participation.

That presents its own unique set of challenges. With such a diverse background of residents who really come from all over the world, there are many unique ideas, perspectives, palates, and thoughts on ways that things should be done. Many of our residents were and still are great cooks, maybe even chefs. It’s the area where we get the most opinions and feedback and likes and dislikes.

We keep our ear to the ground and listen to the good and the bad. I’ve had this happen many times, where one resident tells me how much they loved the meal they were just served, and not five minutes later, someone tells me the opposite. It can be a challenge at times, but listening to our residents and their ideas is critically important.

We create our menus corporately, but then we take the menus that have been created by our chefs and dining room managers and tailor them more specifically to our community and its likes and dislikes. We have meetings regularly with our Table Talk committee, and we want to hear what they have to say. We even started doing a mock menu planning exercise with residents so we could plan the menu together. That's been helpful because it shows us what our community wants versus what another community might want or not want. That's helped create a successful culinary program at Delmanor Northtown.

I love chicken wings, and we do those really well. One area where our team in the kitchen really excels is soups. That’s where I always go first when it’s lunchtime, to find out what the soup of the day is, and almost always it’s a home run.

Sometimes residents come forward with one-off ideas or unique interests, and our LivingWell™ team often tries to take that idea and tailor it to the whole community because you never know when you might come up with something that lots of people will like that you maybe didn’t think of before. It’s about taking fresh perspectives and making them a little more community-wide. Our LivingWell team also works one-on-one with residents, depending on their preferences or ideas. That has led to learning even more about certain residents’ likes and dislikes, helping us shape programming in a more personal way.

In the almost 12 years that I’ve been at Delmanor Northtown, I’ve seen an evolution. When we first opened, the idea of aging in place was not as much of a thing. The typical trajectory was that residents would move in until we couldn’t really meet their care needs any longer, and then they would move somewhere else. What we’ve learned over time is that people don’t want to move.

Moving is stressful, and that is not made easier when you’re older, and it takes its toll more physically and emotionally. So we’ve looked at other options that involve aging in place. At Delmanor Northtown, we don’t have an assisted living floor, and we don’t have memory care, but we still are able to offer more of a care-behind-closed-doors sort of idea.

Quite a number of residents receive private care either from us at Delmanor or from a private agency. The one area that our community doesn’t really have the ability to accommodate is more dementia care that is a little further along, simply because we don’t have a unit dedicated to that. But most other circumstances and situations are available, provided that the resident and the family want to go that route.

The one area that our community doesn’t really have the ability to accommodate is more dementia care that is a little further along, simply because we don’t have a unit that is dedicated to that, which can make it a little more challenging. But most other circumstances and situations, provided that the resident and the family want to go that route, are available and we have those resources available for them. It’s worked well for us to date for those who have the resources and do want to stay in our community.

Within the community, we have a great resource called Delmanor TV, which can post different videos and messages. The weekly or daily menus are up, and that is something residents can access instantly on their televisions at any time. We also have updates posted in a large mailroom with a big board that has community updates there as well.

For the families, we send out regular emails, and that’s really the main method of communication with residents’ families. We’re sending roughly at least weekly, sometimes more, depending on any changes that are going on. We tend to communicate that way with the families to let them know about updates and anything going on within the community.

Typically, we talk with the residents first, and depending on the circumstances, we also have what we would call a multidisciplinary care conference. That’s when we would actually get together with a family member or substitute decision maker, sit together in the room, and talk about any concerns or changes, and most importantly, answer questions they may have with regard to care or other resources the resident may need.

One of the interesting changes that I’ve seen over time is maybe the formality of residents. When we first opened, dinner was an event. Residents would come down dressed really nicely, and it was an event to come down to dinner every day. Over time, I’ve seen that change and become a little bit more casual. That has been interesting to observe.

Technology is really a big driver of everything that we do. The demand for things like the internet, as simple as that may sound, was much less important 12 years ago than it is now. Now the majority do have internet and those capabilities, whereas it was a lot less in the past. So the focus on technology is definitely ramping up.

Our building and community are beautiful and in a wonderful location that’s really accessible. Despite the fact that we don’t have a pool, we have the aquatic center nearby, so residents still have easy access to that type of exercise. Technologically, we’re probably going to see some changes in terms of security systems, nurse call systems, and how the technology has really advanced for those types of things.

Shop around. That’s not something we’re afraid to recommend to people because we’re very confident in what we have to offer and confident that no matter how much shopping around one might do, Delmanor Northtown is probably the right fit for them, and they’ll probably come back to us. But it’s important to do that so that you have an idea of what is out there and what is available.

Over the years, people have told me that they’ve shopped at four, five, or six different places, and all the places are nice, but they didn’t get that feeling when they walked through the front doors. That’s something that we do, and we do so well, and we’re confident in that.