When people think of recreation therapy, they often think of fun and games.
But there’s more to it says Lydia, who is a recreation therapist in Whitehorse.
She says recreation therapy focuses on the entire person: Emotional well-being, social skills, confidence, and overall quality of life.
We asked Lydia about her work in the Yukon and why she loves working with Elders and seniors.
When did you first consider becoming a recreation therapist?
I started working in a retirement home when I was fifteen. At the time I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career but I enjoyed working with a geriatric population.
When I started my career, I actually started in addictions counseling but soon realized I wanted a more lighthearted job.
Later I heard about recreation therapy and I thought that sounded like the perfect job for me. So, it’s funny. Even though I started working in a retirement home at 15, it wasn't until later that I had figured out that recreation therapy is where I wanted to be.
What do you like about working with older people?
I love the stories and the lived experiences. I love coming to work, because working with Elders and seniors is like having a little family of a bunch of grandparents.
You have all of these Elders and seniors who are looking after you! Even though you're here to look after them.
You build this wonderful relationship that is fun.
What is your goal as a recreation therapist?
Recreation therapy is a profession that focuses on every single domain of the person. So we actually do programing for social domain, for emotional domain, for physical, for cognitive and spiritual.
How many people do you work with at Whistle Bend Place?
At Whistle Bend Place I work with between 30 to 50 people.
I do like that I work with the same people and get to know them over time.
Can you tell me more about the social, emotional and spiritual work?
I am happy to touch on this, because I love educating people on what recreation therapy is. People often get us mixed up with physio and occupational therapy. And it’s true we are getting people moving, getting people up and active.
We do bowling and curling and disc golf to get the range of motion going, work on their fine motor skills.
But then we do a lot of programing for other aspects of the person too.
One example is a reminiscing program.
For Valentine's Day we did a “wedding reminisce” where we had lots of pictures of 1950s and 1960s weddings and vintage cards and images of things like dresses and suits and cakes.
There were some question prompts, and we were able to ask everybody about their wedding day.
One person, at first, did not remember who had walked her down the aisle.
But as we got talking, she remembered. She said “oh my gosh. I remember. My dad was the one who walked me down the aisle!” And she just lit up.
Truly it was like this little bundle of joy for her, because she remembered this, that she unlocked this key memory from her wedding that she had forgotten about and couldn't recall.
That was definitely a favourite moment for me.
I noticed a vinyl record player at Whistle Bend Place. Is that something you use?
Yes, absolutely. We have record players on different houses. We will use the record player because we try to make things as familiar as possible for our residents.
They enjoy all things Elvis, Willy Nelson, Hank Karr, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, the list goes on!
What's something you can do for cognitive skills?
There's a great game that we play quite often here called Shake Loose a Memory. It’s such an awesome game. For example, a card might ask “keep this card if you have ever driven a tractor,” or “keep this card if you ever had a nickname.” Players take cards that apply to them. Then we ask follow-up questions and it gets people talking about their past and remembering good times.
We also do “armchair travels” where we pick a country and we go visit it virtually from our armchair or wheelchair. We learn about the food that they eat, their currency, we figure out how much a flight would cost to get there and talk about travel.
How do you work with other professionals in health care?
At Whistle Bend Place the therapeutic services team meets every single morning. That includes recreation therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech-language pathologists, our First Nation liaison workers, spiritual care workers as well as care coordinators and volunteer services.
We also meet with nursing staff. At these meetings, we digress on every single person. Did they have their care? Where are they in their program of activities? What interventions are we testing? It's just a way to connect face-to-face at the same time every day.
What do you like about the Yukon?
I think anyone who's been here can understand why we live here. It. Every community has walking trails and scenic views.
You can go fishing ten minutes down the road.
Working in continuing care, a lot of my residents are from the Yukon. That means either they are from Whitehorse or they could be from Beaver Creek, Mayo, Faro, Dawson City, you name it.
But we also care for people from all over the world. I have people from Germany, from Hungary, from Korea.
We all have these wildly different paths that have brought us here. And the commonality that most of us have here is that the Yukon stole our hearts...
What are the challenges of this role?
It can be hard to work with the older population because we do build rapport. They become like these grandparents to you. And of course, with old age, they pass away eventually.
So there's a really heavy portion to this job.
But no matter what, there's not a day that goes by where I don't feel like I gave back to the community. With recreation therapy, I know that I tried and I was potentially able to make their last days or years amazing.
I remember that I was able to bring them on a canoe trip, take them fishing, even bring them for a Big Mac at McDonalds. Having them enjoy these things that they might not have the means to do or the capabilities to do otherwise.
And the Yukon is incredible for that. There aren’t many places where you can say you get to take 90-year-olds canoeing!