Shaver Dieu gets rehab
Niagara College students have unveiled the results of the school’s latest Many Hands project.
It might seem unusual to find a mocked-up marketplace or a fully equipped carpentry shop within a health-care facility.
But those amenities, used to help patients get back on their feet while recovering from traumatic injuries or illness, fit in perfectly at Hotel Dieu Shaver Health and Rehabilitation Centre.
“That’s what we do, we simulate real life,” said Hotel Dieu communications director Mary Jane Johnson.
The newly constructed marketplace gives patients an opportunity to practise “everyday skills that everyone takes for granted — bending, using a walker, manoeuvring around shelving,” she said.
And although the carpentry shop has been a fixture at the Glenridge Avenue rehabilitation centre for years, it was in desperate need of renovations.
“Typically, I’d say 20 years ago a lot of hospitals had carpentry shops,” she said. “But because of funding a lot of hospitals had to cut those programs. We thought that it was very important to our patients because of how it lifted them and the feeling they got from having the finished product after doing all the therapy and recovering.
“Keeping the carpentry shop was No. 1 on our list.”
Johnson said Hotel Dieu’s management had plans to renovate the room where the old carpentry shop was located into two new rooms was on their to-do list for a long time.
The plans was to divide the room, and use half to create “the marketplace,” with shelves stocked with boxes simulating groceries as well as a commercial fridge with sliding glass doors. A newly revamped carpentry shop, fully equipped with woodworking power tools for patients to use during their recovery, would occupy the rest of the area.
“We just didn’t have the funding or the manpower to do it,” Johnson said.
But this year, Hotel Dieu’s renovation as selected by Niagara College for its 20th annual Many Hands program. Hotel Dieu staff Thursday joined students and faculty from Niagara college to unveil the results of months of effort to help make those plans a reality.
“Without Niagara College, it wouldn’t have happened,” Johnson said.
In the past two decades, the Many Hands program has in the past assisted organizations including Hope Centre in Welland, the Salvation Army in Fort Erie and the Upper Deck Youth Centre in Vineland, to name a few.
“In a world that seems increasingly cynical, it’s very exciting to see students embrace the sense of giving back and social responsibility,” said college president Dan Patterson.
This year, Many Hands enlisted the efforts of the college’s events management students who brought in more than $42,400 to cover the costs of materials and equipment by organizing events that included a pasta dinner called Journey Through Italy and a vendor market called Life N Style Niagara, while about 32 construction and renovations technician students spent almost every Friday since Jan. 13 working to make the project a reality.
“This is a tremendous project that’s going to help patients going through Hotel Dieu for rehab, and we’ve been able to have a value added component for patients in a refurbished space,” Patterson said.
“This was all one room” Johnson said.
“It was our carpentry shop. Essentially, they cut the room right in half and made it two separate functioning rooms for therapy.”
Construction and renovation program co-ordinator Colin Robinson said his students collectively contributed about 1,000 hours to the project, building a new sound-proof wall with laminated safety glass windows to separate the carpentry shop from the new marketplace, and adding new flooring, ceilings and wall surfaces.
Working within a health-care facility added to the challenges for students.
“Dust control, environmental control, finishes, it all had to be right,” he said.
He said the existing carpentry shop’s old concrete floor needed a lot of attention.
“The floors in the old shop were really wonky,” he said, adding self-levelling concrete was used before a vinyl plank floor could be installed.
Student Katie MacKenzie called the renovation “an insane learning experience.”
“Learning how to start with something and then change it to make something new is basically a huge difference compared with just building something new,” she said.
The marketplace and carpentry shop are the latest additions to a growing list of unusual amenities at the rehabilitation facility, that also include a real car parked below a real traffic signal light in the centre’s enclosed courtyard, as well as a boxing ring built last year with funding from Wise Guys Charity and slightly modified to meet infection control standards for the facility, as well as the needs of the people using it, including patients in wheelchairs.