Abstracts & Presentation Summaries - Department of Health

Broadly speaking, the services we offer to these clients are mainly therapeutic and
are designed to maintain them at home as independent as possible.
I hope you are getting a picture of the diverse nature of our service and of our
extensive repertoire. Despite the broad range of services we offered, we believed
there was an opportunity to innovate in response to client needs.
Thus, today, we are very proud to present our relatively new and certainly
innovative program called “Festive Friends”.
First, I would like to tell you a little bit about what the program is about and how it
became a part of our service. Many services in our municipality were closed for two
weeks over the Christmas break. This included our service.
However, every year we noticed our clients became hugely disappointed when we
advised them of the Christmas break. In addition, we noticed increased interest and
enquiries from carers at that time of year. So we took a step back, and began to think
about what was really going on.
We learned that no day activities were available in our municipality during this time
of year. There was a commonly held belief that our clients preferred to be with their
families and that few would attend services if offered during the Christmas break.
As you are all aware, this runs counter to the evidence.
In fact, people are becoming more and more isolated even from their families.
For many people, Christmas is “just another day and nothing much to do”!
Our Municipality has a large and growing Asian population. This means that for
about 20% of all elderly people in the City of Greater Dandenong Christmas does not
have any cultural significance. This leaves them with no alternative activities over
the Christmas period.
All this was our reasoning behind the grant application to the Department.
Our application was successful – we were offered the opportunity to make a
difference.
As we received the money one month before the commencement of the program,
our “Festive Friends” began to take a definite shape very swiftly. In one month we
had to generate publicity, accept and process referrals, book staff and volunteers,
plan transportation, meals and activities.
All this took careful planning, staff training, brainstorming and generally very hard
work. Inevitably, some tensions also arose. But in the end, all our hard work paid off.
Our experience can be very useful for those of you who are thinking about a similar
project. Thus I must mention higher then usual staffing costs for public holidays,
difficulties in arranging transportation and meals for clients, as most services are
closed at this time of year. We were lucky to have our council bus service offer their
buses for us and our staff to drive the buses. Otherwise this exercise could be very
difficult. For meals we had to plan ahead and do some of our shopping to stock up
for Public Holidays.
Staffing the program became a big problem. As you can imagine, Christmas Day and
Boxing Day were the hardest. However a double time and a half pay attracted just
enough people.
55