Maplewood beats outbreak with new best practice

Room bingo allows residents to enjoy favourite activity while in compliance with public health unit

April 24, 2012 -- Deron Hamel

Maplewood life enrichment co-ordinator Rachel Corkery says "when life hands you lemons, don't just make lemonade, make lemon cake."

In fact, this phrase has been posted on the home's bulletin board this week to keep spirits up during an outbreak.

Corkery and the rest of the staff members at the Brighton long-term care home lived up to these words yesterday when they found out the outbreak would not be lifted for another day.

So, what did the team do? They discovered a new best practice for beating the outbreak blues — room bingo.

Bingo is one of residents' favourite activities, however, because the public health unit does not recommend non-essential group gatherings, bingo games had not been played since the start of the outbreak.

Corkery then thought up a unique way to play bingo without making it an activity where everyone had to be in the same room together. She mentioned the idea at morning report, and it received buy-in from administrator/director of care Nancy McNairn and the rest of the team. And thus, room bingo was born.

"I said, half-jokingly, what if we handed out bingo cards to everyone in the room and then we announced the numbers over our PA system," Corkery tells the OMNIway.

So, that's exactly what staff and family members did. But how did residents feel about this new take on bingo?

"It went over fantastically," she says.

Creating this new take on bingo was that easy. The only other step involved in the process was disinfecting the bingo cards after the game was finished.

The outbreak could not have happened at a worse time — it was the home's turn to use the OMNI van when it began, and Maplewood had planned several resident outings — but from the experience has come a new best practice for the home and other OMNI Health Care long-term care homes to use in these circumstances, says Corkery.

"Today we really made lemon cake," she says.

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