Today, the Casa San Antonio team woke up bright and early to begin working at 6am. We started our day early to observe and assist caregivers with bathing and dressing duties. From what we observed, it is amazing to see how well cared for these residents are. Staff is limited which makes morning tasks a bit difficult. There is one caregiver for about 20 men and another before about 20 women. Every patient is bathed and dressed in the morning before breakfast at 8am. Which is very different from what we see in the United States. From my experience, I know that not every patient in the states gets bathed everyday nor is everyone up and dressed before breakfast is served. There are many aspects of the patient care in Nicaragua that I would love to bring back home to America. Every patient here is bathed daily, dressed nicely for the day, and you can really feel and see the love that every caregiver has for every single patient.
During our time at Casa San Antonio today we held a group exercise class. We had about 25 participants with 6 of us leading the class. We had music playing to get the patients engaged. The class began with a warm up which included some stretching and slow active range of motion. Next we did some dancing which the patients truly loved. The next activity that was the biggest hit with the patients was passing and kicking around beach balls. Everyone’s face lit up from ear to ear with laughter and pure joy. We got every patient to participate no matter what level of functional mobility they had. We ended the class with a nice cool down and deep breathing. This was our second day performing the group exercise class and every single patient seems to really enjoy the activity. It makes us all extremely happy to have all these patients be active and bring some pleasure and excitement to their day and lives.
