Therapeutic Touch is very active at Hospice Wellington in Guelph and Wellington County. Those who volunteer for Hospice Wellington have level 3 TT and take a volunteer course with the organization.
On Wednesday, October 16th, this group of volunteers, along with Rachel Stockdale, our staff person, gathered for a meeting, education session and of course, a pot luck dinner. We were updated with procedures and policy regarding our residential services. Deb Gould, one of our local TT teachers, gave us an educational component on how to dress for residential clients who have contact precautions. We learned to dress properly with gown, mask and gloves and most important…how to take off the gown, mask and gloves without further contamination. Mimi Craig, an RP, (retired TT teacher) presented the statistics of how many TT sessions and how many hours were given by our TT hospice volunteers. Currently, we go to clients’ homes for 1:1 time (or to the hospital), to the Guelph General Hospital Chemotherapy Clinic and to the Oncology Clinic at Groves Hospital in Fergus. Lastly, we do our best to give TT sessions daily to our residents in our 10-bed hospice facility in Guelph. If family or friends of the resident would like a session, we give them one too. The chart below shows these numbers. But we also give sessions to staff (community and residential) and other volunteers. As these last sessions are not counted in their statistics, the actual number of Therapeutic Touch sessions are higher for hospice.
