Livewell

with

Sean

“It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, or how much you know. We are all the same. You get reminded of how life can be unfair, and the residents are just amazing even though they suffer from this disease.”

Sean Van Wyk,

Quality of Life Manager

I am the quality of life manager, so at the moment I am concentrating more on the research to get a lot of trends set out for what type of assessments we need to do and, currently managing the occupational therapists, the quality of life leaders and the companions that we have and I think it’s more, just getting the data in, at the moment, but, in future, we will be looking more at the activity programs and there will be a lot of changes coming in 2020 and beyond.

About a year ago, I was involved in training about dementia and we had about 8 different types at that stage, we’ve gone to 13 types at the moment, and currently it goes up to about 18. It’s an ongoing thing that will never stop, I think, evolving. And as pioneers, we always need to be ahead of the game.

I think I’ve always known that I would like to be of assistance to people who are less fortunate, it doesn’t matter what type of less fortunate. I think most people that are in this industry have had some sort of  family member suffer from this disease.  I had a grandmother who suffered from this disease and it was something that was close to my heart so it was an easy decision to come and work here.

Living well, to me, is to look after our residents in the best way. The way they would have wanted to look after themselves had they not had this disease. And I think that’s what we try and bring to them. It’s an overmedicated disease at places normally and what we try and do is keep everything as natural as possible.