The leaves have started to change, and each passing day brings us closer to the holiday season. Every year, we eagerly anticipate this time as an opportunity to be physically close to family and friends, to share meals and connect meaningfully with those who are the most important to us. But with COVID-19 in our lives,…
The pursuit of purpose is a basic human right. Older adults in senior living and long-term care communities deserve to experience meaningful engagement every day. As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded in the past six months, the community lockdowns and physical distancing measures have increased social isolation resulting in a devastating impact on the physical,…
What would you do if you had to engage a very large number of residents with diverse preferences and abilities to ensure maximum well-being on an almost nonexistent budget? The answer would be to find an extremely accessible activity that can be done with little support at a low cost with high cognitive and social…
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, most senior living providers are reporting that their residents are experiencing both cognitive and physical declines due to a lack of consistent and meaningful engagement. Frontline staff members are struggling to provide engagement more than ever before and need support. They now have little outside help with resident…
As the country is planning to reopen after lockdowns due to COVID-19, senior care providers are grasping the implications of this phase for their operations, staff and well-being of residents. An obvious goal is restoring the quality of the experience they provide older adults. To achieve this, the first step is to analyze how COVID-19…
Helping older adults find purpose every day is more important than ever in this new world of physical distancing that we are living in. It is heartening to see how frontline staff have shown passion, creativity and resilience during this COVID-19 pandemic in order to continue providing meaningful engagement for every resident. Our workforce is…
My brother lives in Shanghai, China with his wife and 6-year old son. As COVID-19 unfolded they were lucky to escape the crisis to France in order to live with our parents. A few weeks later, though, the exact same situation happened in France and in other countries in Europe. He witnessed not once, but…
The majority of providers I talk to today share that they are not doing enough 1:1 engagement, and that means to me that we are failing our residents, especially the ones living with cognitive change or dementia. There are many reasons for this such as staffing issues, residents needing more and more attention, and documentation…
Although New Year’s resolutions are sometimes quickly set aside, there is value in setting goals for ourselves. This is especially important in the resident engagement discipline where we have been struggling to implement measurable goals and monitoring progress toward them. This has been changing recently as we see more and more long-term care providers trying…
Since we started Linked Senior, our goal has always been about collaborating with older adults and their care partners so they can find purpose every day. In building our company we quickly understood the value of measuring engagement. Management consultant Peter Drucker said it best: “What gets measured gets improved.” But one could ask, what…
