How Shepherd Village Provides Residents With Personalized Experiences

Background

Shepherd Village has been committed to meeting the changing physical, spiritual, and social needs of seniors with quality and compassionate care since 1961. As Toronto’s largest not-for-profit seniors’ community, Shepherd Village consists of retirement living, assisted living, and long-term care facilities designed to accommodate seniors at every level of support. 

Estelle Brown is the Manager of Recreation & Volunteer Services at Shepherd Lodge, the community’s long-term care branch. Estelle and the team’s goal is to enhance resident quality of life through increased recreational programming that serves the residents’ interests and needs.

“We’re trying to provide the best recreational programming possible in every way we can,” says Estelle.

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Challenges

To provide residents with the best possible programming, recreation teams need to have an in-depth knowledge of their residents’ goals, interests, and backgrounds. But getting to know each resident personally can be challenging and time-consuming in large communities like Shepherd Village. The more information that recreation teams can gather about their residents when they come to the community, the easier it is for them to provide residents with the best care and make them feel at home.

“Shepherd is a very big community,” Estelle says. “It has something for every stage of life that we experience as we get older.”

For recreation professionals who need to get to know many residents, resident assessments are an invaluable tool. However, Shepherd Village was using older platforms to document resident information. These records were difficult to access and data was often missing or outdated. The Shepherd Village interdisciplinary team saw a need to improve their documentation to ensure they were meeting their residents’ physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs. They wanted to try something new to better serve their residents and enhance their quality of life.

“I want my team to have clear documentation so that we can provide more information to the whole interdisciplinary team,” says Estelle. “If we can make documentation a little easier, then we can serve the residents better.”

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Solution

Shepherd Village began searching for a resident experience platform that would enable them to increase their recreation services and offerings through improved documentation. They needed a platform that could offer world-class onboarding and customer support so teams would start seeing the benefits right away.

Shepherd’s search for a resident experience platform ended when they discovered Welbi at a conference in 2019 and reached out for a demo. Shepherd staff were reassured knowing that Welbi’s customer experience team would support them through every step of the implementation and remain available to answer any questions they had.

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Results

With the help of the customer experience team, staff at Shepherd Village quickly adjusted to Welbi’s user-friendly software. Within the month, they were accessing the benefits that Welbi’s resident experience platform has to offer.

“Welbi helped us with our initial resident assessments so we could gain deeper insight into our residents and how we can best fulfill their physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs,” says Estelle. “I use resident assessments as a tool for the whole team to get to know our residents better so that we can provide better care.”

Welbi’s resident assessments enable staff to surface important information quickly. With their residents’ life stories at their fingertips, staff can connect with residents on a personal level to provide better care.

The Welbi platform’s integration with PointClickCare further ensures that resident data is consistent and accessible between Shepherd Lodge and the Terrace, the community’s retirement and assisted living branch.

“I love how the whole interdisciplinary team can see documentation done in Welbi through PointClickCare, so they can learn about our residents’ interests,” Estelle adds. “This can help spark conversations and build relationships.”

With one source of truth throughout Shepherd Village, residents will receive a consistent quality of care should their needs change. Estelle also uses this information to provide family members with updates about how their loved ones are spending their time at Shepherd Lodge. Welbi’s attendance reports allow Estelle and her team to show families what activities their loved ones are participating in and how engaged they are.

From a management perspective, Estelle uses Welbi to ensure her team is continuously improving their processes to better serve their residents and meet their needs. Welbi’s customizable insights allow her to oversee important metrics, such as how many programs are run in a day, if all the domains of wellness are being met, and what programs residents are participating in.

“As the manager of the recreation department, I use insights to see where my team needs to grow, where I might need to support them more, and most of all where we need to support our residents,” Estelle says.

“I found Welbi’s insights and statistics very helpful, very quickly. The diagrams can be very user-friendly for a person like me who’s more visual. It’s quick and easy to see what’s looking great and where we need to improve with no calculations involved.”

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Conclusion

With Welbi, Shepherd Village improved their documentation so that resident information is accurate, up to date, and accessible to the whole interdisciplinary team. Staff can gain a deeper understanding of their residents’ unique life stories and interests, allowing them to provide compassionate, personalized care. Welbi creates one source of truth across the entire organization so that Shepherd Village can provide consistent high quality care to residents should their needs change over time.  

Documenting through Welbi gives Estelle the confidence that her team has all the information they need to meet their residents’ recreational needs. She uses Welbi’s customizable insights to proactively monitor important recreation metrics and to provide her team with the support they need to continuously improve. Residents and their families can rest assured knowing that they’re receiving the highest quality of service that Shepherd Village has to offer.