"We count each day as precious"

It is our mission at CommuniCare to promote the well being of our residents, enrich their existence, and uphold the sanctity of life. We strive to turn the problems of old age into challenges of rehabilitation, to change social isolation into warm friendship and a reorientation to what is good in life. Our goal is to use our knowledge of old age to bring hope where there has been despair. We perform our professional duties in ministering to the body, but recognize that our most important task is to nourish the soul.

We cannot restrain physical deterioration, but we work hard to retard it, to rehabilitate whenever possible. We cannot always restrain mental deterioration, but often we can refurbish the deteriorating mental apparatus. In all cases, we can give to our residents an environment of caring people, a Caring Community.

A Caring Community heals and supports. It is structured as an integration of services designed to care for the resident as a total person by addressing to all of their needs. The common goal of every department and staff member is to relate to our residents as unique individuals each with a different constellation of needs. This is accomplished in two ways. Firstly, our policies; departmental, organization and functioning, are centered on the resident. We exist for their benefit, not the other way around. We endeavor to de-institutionalize our centers and rehumanize our residents, not fit them into our mold and dehumanize them. Second, the most important obligation of every staff member is to reach out to our residents as full human beings, precious and irreplaceable, to know them and share with them the joys and sorrows of living. We are together in our humanity.

There is a saying that "God gave to each people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drink their life." With the elderly, their cup has been shattered; their culture is gone. Our residents were young in a different time. Now they are outcasts. They have become the child to their children; they make fewer and fewer decisions. The enfeeblement of age steals the sight from their eyes, the melody of life from their ears. It is hard to be old but we understand these things. Painstakingly, like an archeologist reassembling the pieces of a shattered vessel, we work to restore our residents. We build a bridge to the past by including their families, helping them to remember who they were. We fashion a life in the present filled with meaningful activities and warm friendships. As for the future, it is not so hard amidst friends.

We have great work to do at CommuniCare . . . join us!

 Relation

"All true living is meeting."
- Martin Buber

We have many skills and talents, many jobs to do. But the main and most important task of each department and each staff person is to reach out to our residents as unique individuals and enrich their well being by the warmth of personal relations.

We cannot take for granted that each of us is capable of the warm, caring relations, which we have set forth as such an important facet of our everyday work. Some people cannot overcome their inhibitions, for to relate fully as a human being is to become vulnerable. Not everyone can smile from their heart, and none of us can do it all the time. Ours is an emotional business, with tension and many frustrations. Sometimes we find that it is easier to turn everything off, however this is when we begin to become less than fully human and treat our residents in a dehumanizing way. This is when the nursing center becomes an institution.

To guard against this behavior and open ourselves to a caring relation we must learn to "see" others rightly. We must see the other person as a whole human being, not a fragmented collection of aches and pains.