Posts Tagged ‘bathrooms’

Food and grab bars

Friday, April 8th, 2011

I realize that I have posted about these two issues on numerous occasions but they are both something of bêtes noires for me.

I have been travelling a lot and have eaten at several seniors’ projects. In one of them (which will remain nameless) the food was execrable. It isn’t often you get to use “execrable” in a sentence and I would have been glad of the opportunity if it weren’t for the fact that because I couldn’t eat the food I was extremely hungry.

I mentioned this to my good friend and colleague Rita Thibault at Westbridge Group Valuation Partner and she said: “Aren’t people trained to cook decent food for large numbers of people?” Good question. One of the residents at a sister project of the aforementioned community, where the food was much better but apparently still not up to snuff, commented that if the chef really were trained at some school the school ought to be shut down.

It consistently amazes and astonishes me that operators serve such lousy food. Even in projects that are fully funded and also full of people who can’t afford to move anywhere else, you would think simple human decency would lead these operators to serve decent food.

Then yesterday I ate a community that prides itself on its food and rightly so. My lunch was delicious. Food costs here are $7.50 per person per day, which is on the high side, but not only are the residents happy, the community generates a lot of revenue by catering outside events.

Enough said about food, at least for today, and on to grab bars. I have been in two seniors communities recently that have no grab bars in the bathroom because these communities are intended for “independent seniors”. That’s just dumb. Even hotels are better than that, or at least some hotels. I am currently staying in a brand new mid-range hotel and there is not a grab bar in site although the bathtub is very high. How many people do you think actually have baths in hotels? Very few I imagine. Why don’t they install showers instead? Even if there is some logic to the bathtubs, why no grab bars? Grab bars make tubs safer for everybody, to say nothing of the one in four British Columbians who are going to be over 65 in no time flat.

So there you have it – my rants for today.

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Bathrooms

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The rule is, no bathtubs in units with only one bathroom. If there are two bathrooms, a bathtub in one of them is fine. Bathtubs are hard to get into and hard to get out of. If someone needs help with bathing, it is much easier to provide that assistance in a shower. It really should not be necessary to point this out in 2010, but sadly it is. Of course the no bathtub prohibition applies only to new buildings—there are thousands of units with bathtubs in old buildings. Some places are replacing bathtubs with showers and that is a good idea, although relatively costly.

Floors in bathrooms should be non-slip. Toilets should be raised. There should be enough grab bars in the right places[i] but please try and make the bathroom look safe and inviting, not like something straight out of a hospital ward. Towel bars can double as grab bars if they are sturdy enough. As long as walls are reinforced for later installation of additional grab bars, it is not necessary to have every square inch of a shower enclosure covered with grab bars. It’s interesting to note that my 20-something son lived for a while in an apartment that had originally been intended to accommodate seniors. The requisite grab bars had been placed in the shower enclosure and beside the toilet. When he moved away from the apartment, he missed the grab bars! Anyone can slip in a shower—you don’t have to be 85 for that fate to befall you.

[i] See CMHC, Evaluation of Optimal Grab Bar Placement for Seniors

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