Westwinds Communities' senior's living facilities have managed to avoid the fate that's befallen many other assisted living homes during the pandemic.

CEO Lauren Ingalls says a lot of credit for that goes to the staff and residents themselves.

"Our staff has been very diligent, not only in their professional lives but in their personal lives, in terms of practicing good social distancing, hand washing and PPE practices," she says. "We have an existing pandemic plan, we as an organization have experienced influenza outbreaks in the past and so have some exposure to outbreaks, and so we went ahead in early February and implemented our pandemic response plan and we've been really diligent in communicating with our seniors and their family members and their friends the absolute importance of making sure we remain diligent with those hand sanitation, social distancing and PPE practices."

She says at the same time they've gone through the first wave of the pandemic while balancing all the needs of the seniors to connect with family, making sure they're able to maintain their mental health.

Ingalls says they were impacted early on when Alberta Health Services restricted caregivers from working at more than one facility.

She says they have held on to those jobs for those staff members who decided to work at their first choice job.

Early on they had three staff members who had to isolate for 28 days when someone in their family tested positive for the COVID-19 virus and Ingalls says that did put considerable pressure on them.

Staffing has actually increased by 15 per cent to accommodate the additional sanitation protocols and monitoring and screening that has to be done with everyone that comes into the building as well as residents or contractors.

Ingalls says the due diligence on the part of staff and residents has allowed them to make changes to visitation rules.

"Monday we actually moved to in-suite visits and we have found that's been probably the most responsive, most of lour lodges had a number of visits starting on Monday where either family or friends went and visited within their suites," she says.

Thursday October 1 is the United Nations International Day of Older Persons.

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