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Make Nursing Home Visits FunMemorable Activities for Residents in Nursing Care Facilities
Preserving memories for nursing home residents can greatly improve the quality of their lives-and enrich your own as well.
Many people feel uncomfortable or anxious whenever they visit someone in a nursing home, even when the individual is a close relative—grandparent, parent, sibling--or friend. They find that they run out of things to talk about or can’t find ways to entertain the person, so they find more and more reasons to stay away. Research shows that it’s critical for older people to regularly engage in mentally stimulating activities to help keep their minds sharp, and this is also true for many of the 1.3 million people who reside in the 16,000 nursing homes in the United States. Yet the day-to-day routine of a nursing home, even those that offer many social activities, can be very depressing and mind-numbing for its residents. Activity: Build a Legacy ScrapbookActivities that allow nursing home residents to draw upon their life experiences, dreams, and goals and to share them with others can be highly fulfilling both for the residents and for those who interact with them. Does the person you visit like to talk about the past? Then capitalize on it! A fun and potentially educational activity for all involved is to create a legacy scrapbook (or more than one) about the person and his or her life. If the person you are visiting is a family member, you may ask other members to join in and help you gather some of the materials, including photographs, mementoes, newspaper clippings, even old recipes. If the resident you visit is a friend, you might explain your idea to his or her family members to see if they would like to help. Engage the nursing home resident as much as possible in the project: ask questions about his or her past, beginning in childhood, and write up brief paragraphs about different remembered events or situations. Ask the resident to help you match up pictures, keepsakes, or other items to put in the scrapbook that will enhance the stories. You can create a legacy scrapbook for different eras or portions of the person’s life; say, his or her childhood, college days, career, years raising a family, retirement. Activity: Armchair Traveler ScrapbookRather than create a scrapbook about places the person has visited, build one about countries and locations he or she wanted to visit but did not. You can bring in travel magazines and brochures and let the resident choose the pictures and stories to go in the scrapbook. You can stimulate more of the senses by showing travel videos of the locales (these can often be borrowed from local libraries for free), playing music that is native the countries chosen, and bringing in native foods (check with the nursing staff to make sure the person can eat the food). Activity: Life StoryMany older people want to leave a legacy for their families in the form of a memoir or autobiography. You can interview the nursing home resident or encourage him or her to tell their story and tape it for transcription, save it in audio form, and/or video tape your sessions. You could be creative and make the project a multimedia production with text, audio, and video, a lasting legacy for the patient’s loved ones. Source National Center for Health Statistics/National Nursing Home Survey
The copyright of the article Make Nursing Home Visits Fun in Seniors' Health/Medicare is owned by Deborah Mitchell. Permission to republish Make Nursing Home Visits Fun in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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