Interview with Scarborough Retirement Residence management, Maureen Scordamaglia

We’re a close-knit family in regards to, it’s a family business. We’ve been in operation for 30 years, and what brings that is a lot of experience. We’re very close with our residents, and we’re very close with the families as well. So it’s a larger family in all at Scarborough Retirement Residence.

When I was looking for a position, I wanted something in my community. I came from a much larger organization and missed that interaction with people, and this came available, and it was a perfect fit.

I’ve actually been at Scarborough Retirement Residence for 13 years and learned so much along with our residents and our other staff. We like to be very detailed in the staff that we hire for our community because we want to make sure it’s a good fit.

I found myself surprised at how much this retirement residence is a home. A lot of times, people think that it’s more of a hospital-type venue, or somebody has to move in. 

What I found the moment I walked in the door at Scarborough Retirement Residence is that it was very comfortable, and everybody was very happy and very pleasant. It’s interesting to find out that it is that home-like atmosphere that was important to me.

We have daily involvement from our owner, who happens to be the eldest daughter of our co-founders. There’s a history we draw on. 

We like to be involved with our residents so we can share with them the good moments in their lives, whether it’s a new great-grandchild, or maybe it’s the tougher moments where they’ve lost a family member. We’re there for support, and so that’s important to us, to be involved in many different aspects.

We can be more flexible than some larger residences or residences in larger companies. So we’re not necessarily going by set rules. We can be flexible as to what the resident wants. We involve our residents.

Oftentimes, we’ll have a resident who arrives who enjoys doing a certain activity, or maybe they’re into crafts. We want to involve them. We’ve had residents do instructional sessions for other residents.

We don’t want our residents to lose their independence when they move into Scarborough Retirement Residence. We want them to continue doing what they’re doing at their home, but with a little bit more support if they need it. It’s a community of other seniors that they can enjoy their time with each other. It’s also an option to be innovative, and that’s important for us as well.

We have 30 years of experience, and we understand the need for flexibility. We understand how our seniors are changing over time and how things affect them differently, whether it’s physical changes in the environment or other stresses that they have to deal with.

We want to put into place programs that can address those concerns. And pretty much everything we do, we include our residents.

Even when we’re looking at changing our physical building to adapt to changes, to update, we want to include residents. We will ask them about colors that they’d like to see in their dining room, or, Is this chair comfortable for you?

I think that’s our flexibility. We’ve started up programs like our family council where we want to hear from families as well. So, it’s not just the voice of the resident, but it’s a larger community as well. 

It’s important to involve everyone because we want to hear from the resident, obviously, but sometimes the family members have information that can be helpful for us as well. We started a family council, and we have family members attend. It’s open to all families. Not only is it to update about what we are planning with the community, but it’s also a support network for the families who may be dealing with a family member who’s having cognitive issues or mobility issues.

It’s great for them to talk to other family members who are experiencing the same thing and to be able to connect and give ideas of what’s worked and what hasn’t. It also updates us as an organization on what they need from us in order to provide more information for them. That might be having a speaker come in and speak about a specific topic, or changing something in our life enrichment programming that will allow our residents more opportunities to experience other things.

These meetings are often held with our owner, too. So again, they’re having all levels in attendance. When we hear something from that meeting at Scarborough Retirement Residence, we can pretty much put it into place and work with them on those types of things.

We understand how residents change over time. So we’ve actually implemented a lot of changes in our health and wellness department. We’ve added a nurse practitioner who will assist our physicians on-site as well as our nurses on-site.

We’ve had created for us a specially designed geriatric assessment program. Where normally that would be done off-site before somebody’s moving in, we’re now implementing that at Scarborough Retirement Residence. That assists the residents, the families, and ourselves in knowing what’s the best program for somebody coming into our community. For their safety, for their well-being, it’s all integrated that way.

We’ve really looked at programs in our Health and Wellness Department that will benefit residents going forward and living in a safe environment.

We have a choice between our spring and summer and our fall and winter menus. We’ve recently integrated our fall and winter menu. Our menus are produced by our executive chef, but it’s always reviewed with our dining committee as well. We have a group of residents who meet regularly with our executive chef, our executive director, and talk about the menus they’d like to see.

We get a sense of what’s important to them. We can make alterations to that, and then it’s put out to the community. We then follow up with a survey because we want to know, once we’ve instituted the next session of menus, that residents are enjoying what they’re receiving. We also have two choices each day for lunch and dinner, but we also offer an alternative or an à la carte menu. We understand sometimes you just want to change, and that’s fine too. So, we do like to be flexible again with the dining.

I often think of it as we have over 100 residents, or you could also say we have over 100 cooks in our community as well, because they’ve all come from their home cooking food the way they’re used to doing it. So we want to hear what’s important to them at Scarborough Retirement Residence.

Our ribs are fantastic, but it’s a close call with our lasagna, so I don’t know what my favourite thing on the menu at Scarborough Retirement Residence is.

We have many events that are a lot of fun. At Christmas time, we have many things happening.

We have one to celebrate the Christmas area, and we also have a Spring Fling where we actually have an evening gala event. We have a big band that comes in and plays for our residents. There’s dancing and great food. So these are quite popular events and always a lot of fun to put together at Scarborough Retirement Residence. 

We’re fortunate to be right on a bus line, so right outside our door, residents can catch a bus to a subway station or north along our main road. There’s shopping within the community as well, so that’s very accessible for residents to get to.

We’re also fortunate to be right across the street from a seniors community center. In addition to the many choices that residents can experience in our own community, we also have the community center that provides exercise classes, social gatherings, cards and such, and a theater as well. It’s very accessible and residents can just make their way across the street from Scarborough Retirement Residence to enjoy all of that.

The lifestyle at Scarborough Retirement Residence is really a personal choice. We can have residents who can be as busy as they want, doing everything we have to offer under life enrichment, or we have residents who are quite fine to just enjoy reading a good book in our library. There’s no set program. They can choose what interests them the most.

We have our spiritual care as well. So, for residents who want to continue with spiritual care, we actually have our on-site chapel and residents can continue with services there.

We offer lots of opportunities with regard to volunteering. So residents can enjoy the community and help out in different areas, whether it is joining a committee like our dining committee, whether it’s assisting with decorating in our life enrichment. Pretty much what they enjoy, they can continue to do at Scarborough Retirement Residence as well. But our volunteer program is very important and dear to us, and we want to make sure that residents who enjoy doing that can continue doing that in their new home.

It’s important that we have a vast array of different care services. So we can provide residency to somebody who’s very independent, out and about doing what they want to do. We don’t want to be in their way. We want them to continue to do that.

As residents age in place, or maybe somebody coming in who requires more care, we also offer that as well. We do have a nurse on duty 24 hours a day.

We do provide an emergency system pendant for our residents, so the residents and families know that they’re connected with a staff member 24 hours a day.

We do offer an assortment of care packages, and I think the most important thing when somebody’s looking for a community is to have that initial conversation, just to have that discussion of where mom is or where dad is and where they may be looking for support. It’s important to know exactly how we can assist somebody moving into our community.

We actually do have our DUB program as well, so we can go from very independent, right, to a palliative DUB program. It really is flexible. Nobody’s sort of in a set program at Scarborough Retirement Residence. We move with the resident. So as needs change, we’re going to change along with that.

It’s great to have the conversation about what’s holding them back, so then we can explain to them how we can still facilitate those things here. Many times people come in with a set idea of what retirement living is. And by visiting, by having those conversations, we can dispel a lot of myths.

Oftentimes, it is a simple question like somebody may be a pet owner and concerned that their cat or dog can’t come with them. That may stall a lot of other information, but we want to be able to bring that to the forefront because we are a pet-friendly environment at Scarborough Retirement Residence, and that’s just a part of the bigger family.

There are many. We get to know them so well. So it’s a matter of getting to know their personalities. I think that’s important and having those conversations.

One resident who was previously a radiologist, and we would talk about her medical background and that type of thing. So, there are many different personal conversations, or hearing about their family, their history, their travels. So, it’s lovely to get to know them personally and experience a lot with them, as well, at Scarborough Retirement Residence.

I see Scarborough Retirement Residence evolving with regard to our property and our outside space. We are 30 years old, as I mentioned earlier, so we are limited to the space that we have. We already have plans coming up where we’re actually going to be working on our back patio, increasing that space, and making more greenery space. The conversation never stops.

We’re continuing to look at how we can enhance service. Something like our dining room, which we did a renovation about two years ago, we looked at the cosmetic part of it, of course, and wanted to update, but we also looked at how we could provide better service, how we could provide that speedy service, hot meal, all of that. We implemented many changes that increased a better dining experience for our residents at Scarborough Retirement Residence.

Ask all the questions you have. There’s never a question that’s a silly question. All questions are important, and it starts the dialogue.

It’s always good to look around as well. There are some major things that are usually the top decision-makers, whether it’s location, whether it’s services, and that type of, just ask about all those things.

It’s also important to involve the seniors themselves and talk about what’s important to them. Sometimes family thinks they know what’s important, but it’s really hearing from the senior themselves.

There’s a fear of the unknown because they haven’t been through this before, whether it’s the senior themselves or the family member. Knowing the questions to ask, or knowing where to turn, lets you gather all that information to make the best decision possible.