It is very hard for people to pick the perfect place for their loved one because there is a lot of emotion involved or sometimes a little regret or that feeling of am I doing the right thing? Emily Lampa asks Mimi Piciullo, Juniper Glen executive director what she tells those families about what they need to know about picking the right place for their loved one. Mimi says it’s not an easy decision. She says a lot of people are waiting to make this decision and sometimes waiting is harder on the resident, so the sooner you make this decision when you got this tough diagnosis, and they are starting to not recognize key family members and having challenges with using the bathroom and just getting more and more confused. Mimi says the sooner you make this decision for them the better because this is a lot of change for them to manage moving in here and we want to make their transition as smooth as possible. Mimi says we help families with that and guide them along that path to try and make that as smooth as possible for them.
Every resident who lives there has varying levels of memory disease which can be challenging. How does the staff their deal with that? Mimi says you have some very low functioning residents who can’t participate in a very interactive type of activity and there are high functioning residents who can do more. Sometimes there are combined activities where someone can be fully engaged in the activity but somebody’s just there having a cup of coffee or glass of juice just watching what’s going on. Mimi says they have spiritual, physical, music, crafts, and others want to listen to good music and watch the others dance if we are having a dance party. She says there is a variety of different ways to include everyone in the group in an activity and we also try to separate activities based on ability.
Mimi says we are back to having in person visits, but we still have some limitations with that as well. She says that’s hard on families to have their loved ones here and not be able to see them all the time, so we try to accommodate that as much as possible. She says we are limited as to how many visitors they can have in the building at a time, but we certainly work as hard as we can to accommodate them with those things.
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