Working at an aged care facility means I face a number of challenges each day. Despite these challenges, aged care is definitely worth it. There’s no better feeling than watching the elderly residents enjoy themselves and find lives that ease their loneliness by connecting them to like minded people in a similar demographic.
At our specific aged care facility we deal with all aspects of the residents care, including maintaining their physical and mental health, plus their living areas and general facilities. It is a massive job and required 100 employees for 200 residents. My specific role within the facility is maintaining their homes and facilities.
When it comes to maintaining the living spaces of the residents, there are a few things that are categorised as a real disaster. Last week we faced the real disaster of the entire heating system in one of the buildings breaking. I had the urgent task of organising, for every room, ducted gas heating repairs. Sydney’s elderly citizens are very susceptible to the cold, so it was vital that I ensured the heating was repaired as quickly as possible. As it occurred in one of our bigger buildings, the process took a full day.
During this time, we relocated our elderly residents to the common areas and made sure they were comfortable the entire day. We provided hot soup to all the residents and they played games for the entirety of the day. It seemed to be a nice change of scenery for the residents, and we definitely made the best of a bad situation. Whilst we had the heating repair people at the facility, we decided to get heating services done for the rest of the complex. We definitely did not want any disasters like this to happen again, as elderly people are a group that are severely impacted by changes to their climate.
Thankfully the whole expedition was relatively quick. It could’ve had grave consequences if it hadn’t been.