Every Friday, you can find 72-year-old Kingston resident Poul Busk, at the Adult Day Centre, a community services program offered with Providence Care. It is known to most in the community as the Hildegarde Centre.

Poul participates in two full days of recreation therapy every week with a group of nine other adults and today’s activities include football tosses and candy heart stacking competitions.

“I think this program is wonderful and I really like being a part of it,” says Poul. “I enjoy getting out of the house and I love the comradery of it all.”

The Adult Day Program runs five days a week, Monday through Friday and is geared to adults living in the community with a cognitive impairment like dementia, Alzheimer’s or brain injury. The program also acts as respite care for family members or loved ones who are primary caregivers.

“This is the 44^th year of the Hildegarde Centre programing,” says Adult Day Program Coordinator Beth Bruce.  “It’s such an honour to get to know our clients and provide them a safe space to build relationships and get them participating in engaging activities.”

The daily goal for the team behind the Adult Day Program is fun of course, but behind the fun, veteran-recreationist Lisa Rishaur says her team is always focusing on keeping the mind and body of the people they care for active.

“We do daily exercises, like typical stretching, strength building or walking but we also do fun physical activities and games like balloon badminton or ball tosses,” explains Lisa. “For the mind, we love trivia, word games and white board games like Pictionary and these guys really love to socialize with each other which is what it’s all about.”

Beth and Lisa both explain how amazing it is to see people build friendships at the centre, adding that every client in their care has interesting stories to share.

Poul is a self-proclaimed live-theatre enthusiast with a wicked sense of humour and jokes about his journey to finding a place in the Adult Day Program that started five years ago.

“I was doing a lot of theatre and it got to a point where I couldn’t remember any of my lines and I thought, something is wrong here,” he explains. “I got diagnosed with dementia and I thought—okay, this makes sense and as I say, I can’t remember a gosh-darn-thing,” he adds laughing.

And it’s not just Poul who likes to let the jokes fly. 70-year-old Fred VanLuven, who also spends his Fridays at the centre and just finished celebrating his big birthday, has a large collection of classic dad-jokes for a willing audience.

“Have you ever tried bowling the Hildegarde way?” he asks. “Literally speaking, you can have a BALL doing it,” he laughs. All jokes aside however, Fred says one of his favourite activities to do at the centre is word puzzles.

 

“I love when I get word searches to go through and I’m really fast at them, I can look at them and finish them within seconds,” says Fred.

Lisa has been in her role as a recreationist with the Adult Day Program for 16 years and has seen the program develop and change over the years. The biggest change to the program happened in March 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions came into place. The program moved out of the Hildegarde Centre located inside of Providence Manor long-term-care home to its current, temporary, home at Providence Care’s community site located at 525 Montreal Street.

“We really adapted our programming but it hasn’t affected how engaging it is,” Lisa explains. “We do a special activity every day, highlighting holidays and special occasions and incorporating them into our activities,” she adds.

The clients at the Hildegarde Centre become an extended family for the team.

“I get to do what I love every day. I love being with the clients,” says Lisa. “It gives me a purpose to come in here every day and be with them. You get attached, even with the family members of our clients because they’re entrusting us with their loved ones.”

On the outside, the program is fun, engaging and entertaining. The groups share birthdays, holidays, good times and hard. However, at its core, Lisa says recreation therapy and the potential break it provides caregivers, is making a huge difference in the lives of aging adults in our community.

“The one thing I love about this program is that people get to stay in their homes longer and we really get to be our clients’ happy place for the day with the goal being—putting a smile on their face when they go home.”

Recreation therapy provides a safe, fun space for people like Poul and Fred who have been members of the program for a few years now and both say they have no intention of changing how they spend their Friday’s anytime soon.