Opal Healthcare: Living Well in Aged Care

It is natural to want to live in a place where you feel safe and included. By enhancing the indoor and outdoor living spaces in their care communities, Opal Healthcare are creating homely environments where residents can more actively engage in their interests as and when they choose.

Many of Opal HealthCare's care communities have purpose-built memory enhancing spaces, including sewing rooms, billiards and resident-use kitchens. And in some care communities, living spaces have been repurposed to accommodate resident interests. These spaces not only enable residents to connect with their identity, they can prompt reminiscence and evoke a sense of purpose.

For residents living with dementia, these spaces are particularly important because they enable residents to activate different senses - sight, touch, taste, smell and sound - to help remember events, people and places from throughout their lives.

At Killara Glades Care Community, a living space has been repurposed into a sewing, craft and relaxation room. With donations of sewing machines, fabric and textiles galore from families and the broader community, it has become a much loved space for residents who are delighting in making tablecloths and matching serviettes.

For resident Liz, sewing evokes cherished memories of her mother teaching her to sew on industrial machines and making her own hats.

Many residents at Bathurst Riverview Care Community have farming backgrounds, having lived and worked on the land before moving into care. Opal's team created a farmyard garden in the Memory Care Neighbourhood to enable residents to continue to engage in the daily routines that give them comfort and meaning in life.

Complemented by an Australian bird-themed pergola, a windmill and a vintage tractor, residents actively engage in hand-feeding poddy lambs, collecting eggs from the chickens, tending to the raised garden beds which are wheelchair friendly, and harvesting fruit from the citrus trees. For residents, the farm is reminiscent of their time living and working on properties in the Central West. By building and caring for the farm, residents connect to their identity and experience purpose in each day. You can learn more about the farm in Opal Healthcare's Social Impact Report.

Find out more about Opal Healthcare.