Alex

Shores Reflection Paper

My name is Alexandra Shores. I did my internship at Fellowship Home at Meriwether.

This is an assisted living facility located in Milledgeville, Georgia. This facility is family owned

and operated. There are several sister facilities located in South Georgia and the first one was

built in 1978. Fellowship Home at Meriwether was built less than two years ago, and it is

currently at full capacity. There are 60 units in the facility, and there is an active waiting list that

people are constantly interested in. Fellowship Home provided family-like care in a Christian

environment. The staff works together to help wherever they are needed, regardless of whether

or not it is in their job description. The Christian environment comes from the owner’s Christian

values and the facility has daily devotions for residents as well as Sunday church service every

week. The Executive Director, Lauren Sims, manages the whole facility. She oversees all aspects

of the facility including resident care, meeting with the LPN and outside healthcare groups that

come in for specific residents (ie. hospice), handles choosing new residents off of waiting list by

assessing their needs, and she does so much more. There is a LPN on staff that oversees the

Certified Nursing Assistants and Certified Medicine Assistants and their scheduling. The CNAs

and CMAs take care of helping residents with their medicine, assisting with bathrooms and

showers, and they help with food service. The kitchen staff takes care of cooking three meals a

day for the residents and they are overseen by the Chef/kitchen manager. He makes the weekly

menus and handles the scheduling for the kitchen staff. The mission/purpose for Fellowship

Home is to provide its residents a homey, safe, and nice place to live. In addition to providing a

home setting, Fellowship also serves to keep residents healthy. Some residents require full

assistance for taking medications and performing daily activities, while other residents take care
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of everything on their own. Fellowship strives to assess the needs of each resident and provide

the best possible care plan and life for them.

Description of Experiences

My role as an intern was a little bit of everything. I worked with the kitchen staff, at the

front desk, helped the LPN out with some paperwork, and we also worked with the activities

department. The best part of m internship was being able to work with the activities department.

I thoroughly enjoyed being able to apply my creative qualities as well as aspects of my education

that I got in college (ie. nutrition activities). This part of the internship was a lot of fun and very

rewarding because I got to work one-on-one with the residents, and they were very appreciative

of being able to participate in new activities. For our major project, we worked with activities

and they let us plan about twenty activities that somehow related back to mental, social, or

physical health. This was also one of my favorite and most enjoyable things I did at the facility.

We were able to take the reins on all of the activities, from choosing them to planning them to

completing them. The overall most enjoyable part of the internship was being able to get close

to the residents. They love us out there, no doubt, because they tell us this pretty much every day.

I got to sit and talk with them, I got to help them do little tasks they could not do themselves, and

I got to learn from their experiences. The most challenging part of my internship was learning to

be very flexible, working with the memory care patients, and learning the resident’s names. I

wish we could have done more activities. I also wish I could have done more organizational

tasks for the facility. We organized resident folders in the nurses station and we also made some

charts to keep residents vitals and other information more organized. Though these tasks seem to

be tedious and boring, I enjoyed them, and I realize how important it is to have resident

paperwork organized and easy to get to, especially insurance, DNR forms, and doctors’ orders.
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Another thing I wish we could have done was work more with the kitchen for meal planning.

The food was really good some days, and others it was really not great. The residents complained

privately to us but when they had weekly menu review, they often would not speak up about

their thoughts and concerns. For the most part, the meals there are nutritional, but they seem very

repetitive and I feel like there could be more vegetables in the rotation. I also wish we could have

maybe done some health education or activities for the employees. Lauren mentioned this a

couple of times but nothing really came of it. I thought perhaps a fitness competition in which

employees track their steps for a prize would help encourage more physical activity for the

employees and it would be a good way to get everyone involved. I think in the future this

internship could offer not only working with the residents, but also with the employees.

Perception and Evaluation of the Internship

The internship met my personal expectations for the most part. I was not really sure what

to expect when starting the internship, but Lauren did say that we would get to work with the

residents and that it would be very rewarding, which we did get to do. There were certain times

when we had nothing to do, so we worked on stuff for class. This seemed to usually be because

Lauren was very busy. I think that this semester she was a little unprepared to take on three

interns. However, as the semester is coming to a close, she has provided us an “intern to-do list,”

so we have been able to work on tasks here and there and have had less time just sitting around.

The facility was very open to our suggestions. We worked mainly with activities and they were

very excited to have us come in and bring fresh ideas to the table. They provided constructive

criticism for us, since they know they the residents better than we do. Shannon and Collene were

great guides for our major project. The site supervisor, Lauren, did not really check with us all

that much and for a while, she did not give us any tasks or anything to do. Again, I think this was
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just because she is so busy and three interns is a lot of people to have stuff to do for 5 months.

She is very nice and when we did get to sit down with her, she was obviously very smart and had

a lot of good ideas. She has done a lot better job of supervising us here lately. Since we worked

with activities, Shannon and Collene, for a good bit of the semester, I think she felt like they

were taking care of us and providing us with enough to do, which I think they were. I think

maybe if the site supervisor were required to have weekly check-ins with their interns, that

would improve Lauren’s supervision. This was just new to her and I think she got a little lost her

in work and sometimes forgot to check in with us. My experiences could have been improved by

having a “to-do” list from the beginning, that way we would have had less time just sitting

around. I would recommend this site to future interns, but I would warn them to sit with Lauren

early on and request specific tasks to work on, ON PAPER. She mentioned several things we

could do in the beginning, but they fell to the wayside. If she had given us her wishes in writing,

we would have been able to refer back to them throughout the semester. I want to pursue a career

in this setting. I have learned a lot and I really enjoy this population and have a passion for

making their lives happier.

Internship Preparedness

I felt pretty well prepared academically. I felt pretty good in the area of nutrition. We did

several nutrition related activities, and I was able to rely on knowledge I learned from my

nutrition class. I also felt pretty good in the areas of health promotion. We combined this and

nutrition a lot to educate the residents on areas of physical wellness. The courses I found most

useful were nutrition, epidemiology, community health, and program planning. We used a little

bit of each of these throughout the semester and it was nice to be able to actually utilize the

concepts and be able to see them in the workplace. For example, we made handouts for the
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Shores Reflection Paper
residents when the Norovirus went around Milledgeville. This was a combination of

epidemiology and aspects of community health and program planning. Community health helped

us look at the population affected, and program planning helped us design flyers and figure out

how to best reach our audience. I think that the college could look in to the specific intern sites

that students will potentially be going to and help explain a little bit of how public health can be

applied in that setting. It was kind of hard for us to apply public health throughout the whole

internship, but we made it work. I would have felt much more prepared if I had spent some class

time learning about the different aspects of nursing homes/assisted living facilities and how our

education could be applied to working in that setting. Other than that, I feel like the college could

better prepare students for looking for entry-level jobs in public health. There do not seem to be

as many as I would have thought, and I wish that the job search and career options had been

something discussed in more detail in class.

Internship Performance

I learned several things throughout my internship. I learned a lot about customer service.

I handled residents, residents’ families, doctors’ offices, and prospective residents during my

time at the front desk. I feel like I am much more professional than I was at the beginning of the

semester. Seeing how graceful Lauren was when handling tough situations or disgruntled

residents gave me a good example to follow if I ever run into a similar issue. I also learned a lot

about taking notes from doctors’ offices and taking detailed notes for the LPN and Lauren.

Another thing I got some good experience with was serving the food. This seemed like a boring

task that I really did not want to have to do at the beginning of the semester, but I found myself

enjoying handing plates out to residents and being able to ask them all how their day was or give

them a smile. I learned a lot of patience through food service also, because residents would
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forget what they ordered and send their meal back and sometimes get very upset, but I learned to

roll with the punches and keep a smile on my face. I also learned a lot about how important up-

to-date paperwork is in a facility like Fellowship Home. Through sorting files and keeping track

of what residents were missing, I learned what state mandated paperwork was required in each

file and why it was important. I also learned a lot about older people in general. They have very

different needs than we do and doing all of the hands-on activities we did with them, I learned a

lot about what they liked and did not like. I was overall satisfied with my performance during my

internship. I think that I did well considering how much down time we had, and that Lauren was

not always closely supervising us. During the “boring” times it was easy to get my head out of

the professional mindset, but this only happened a few times. When I start in the real world, I

need to make sure I am always punctual, I am thinking of new ideas to bring to the table, and that

I speak up in certain situations where I could be bringing a solution.

Personal/Professional Insights/Benefits

The internship has helped me grow a lot. I learned how to work with people of all

different ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. This is something that will probably help me the

most in my career. I think that professionally, it is important to work with as many different

people that you can because you have a better understanding of people and you are overall better

equipped for facing challenges in the workplace. I gained confidence through working the front

desk and leading tours of the facility. I also gained confidence from leading activities for the

residents. We jumped right in when we started and it was very intimidating at first to lead

activities for a bunch of strangers, but I grew professionally in my confidence level by doing

that. I learned a lot about the senior population as well as assisted living facilities. I learned about

the health of seniors and what they do and do not need to have in their lives. Working with the
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kitchen we were able to see what kind of meals are sufficient for this population. Working with

Jared, we were able to see what kind of medical care different residents were needing and what

issues were more common among the population. Working with Lauren helped me see all the

stuff that goes in to running an assisted living facility. I did not realize all of the paper work and

state mandated things that were required. Since I want to pursue a career in this field, I am glad

that I got to get a taste of all of the different aspects of assisted living. I feel confident in

activities, concierge, billing, filing, and more.