Helping Patients Adjust in the South Unit

Sheena Kirkham has spent her nursing career at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital. She is a Camosun College trained LPN (Licensed Practical Nurse) and a physiotherapy assistant on the South Unit. The South Unit has 22 beds in which people await transfer to a long-term care facility, either the one at SPH or another close by.

Sheena focuses on keeping patients happy and comfortable while they wait to be admitted to a long term care facility. She encourages each patient to be as mobile as possible while striving to know each personally, even though some patients stay as little as two months. It’s a challenging job, to cheer them, when she is often faced with the task of telling a patient that he or she may never be able to return home. She helps them cope with the worry of having not completed the tasks they think necessary to finally leave their homes, or of having no family nearby.

As renovations to the unit are undertaken, Sheena hopes it will become attractive to more volunteers. Music, social interaction and cheerful surroundings may seem small things, but Sheena knows that they make all the difference to people who are dealing with major changes in their lives.

-from an article by Barbara Harwood