Exposure to LTC as child prompts health care aide’s career choice
Friday, September 30, 2005 -- Natalie Miller
From a talcum powder fight with a colleague to sharing a joke, the health care aide’s goal is to make a resident laugh each day.

Linda Glover announced that goal to her classmates during her first day of nursing school 31 years ago.

“I’m here to make people laugh,” says Linda, who works at Maplewood in Brighton.

“It’s not hard to get people in long-term care to laugh.”

Linda was first exposed to long-term care when she was a teenager and her grandparents were both residents of an Ottawa-area home. She spent many days visiting them and they would join her family for supper at her home every Sunday. “I’ve been in long-term care since I was a kid,” she says.

“My grandparents were always very special to me. I had a very special spot in my heart for them.”

When Linda decided she wanted to work with the elderly, she sought employment at a chronic care hospital in Ottawa. Her husband, who is in the military, was later transferred and she was hired on at Maplewood 20 years ago.

“I love old people. They bring the best out of me.”

What has kept Linda at Maplewood is the environment and structure of long-term care. She likes the fact she gets to know residents and their families well.

A poignant moment in Linda’s career occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and The Pentagon in Washington. When the news came on television she stopped what she was doing -- making beds -- and went and sat with the residents. “We have a lot of veterans,” she says. One woman told Linda she could not go fight another war. Others chimed in as well. “I made a special point of sitting with them,” she says.

Linda believes in resident-focused as opposed to task-focused care. “We take the long-term care out of everything,” she says. “These are people living day to day.”