What Can Recreation Therapy Do for Your Family Member?
Learning new skills can be tough for someone with developmental disabilities but experimenting with a variety of teaching methods can be incredibly helpful. One type of tool, recreation therapy, teaches a host of different skills through play and fun. This can help these types of skills to “stick” more easily in your family member’s repertoire, too, which is incredibly important for retaining those skills to use them in multiple situations.
Improve Attention Span and Coordination
Activities that deal with skills like eye/hand coordination and attention span difficulties can sometimes be boring and can cause people who need to develop those skills to feel frustrated more easily. By practicing those skills through games, fun activities, and play your family member is able to learn those skills while primarily having fun. The activity itself takes the front seat and the actual learning is accomplished without as much effort and frustration.
Teach Coping Abilities
It’s often a lot easier to see how to apply coping skills when using those skills actively. Recreation therapy offers your family member a chance to try out different coping skills and to see how they work in a real-world way. This can help those skills to be much easier to access when your family member needs them later, especially as she gains even more skills.
Learning Activities Related to Play and Leisure
Sometimes it’s more difficult in general for your family member to lean into play. There may be physical disabilities that make play more painful or complicated and that’s a big difficulty to overcome. Recreation therapy removes a lot of the restrictions and can allow your family member to feel more capable of adapting certain activities to her needs. That can be beneficial elsewhere, too.
Gaining Life Skills Related to Community
Interacting with other people and functioning within social boundaries is sometimes tricky to learn. It’s also not necessarily a “classroom” type of activity. Recreation therapy allows your elderly family member to learn those lessons in a more natural environment and then apply them elsewhere. Again, there’s a lot of pressure removed because of the atmosphere in which the skills are learned.
Residential habilitation services offer tools like recreation therapy to assist people with developmental disabilities as they strive to achieve their goals. This type of therapy is a low-pressure way to gain valuable skills that lead to positive results much more quickly than participants sometimes expect.
If you are considering residential habilitation in Speedway, IN, please call the caring staff at RSI Cares. Serving Greater Indianapolis Area. Call for Immediate Info & Assistance: 317-471-0750.
As a practicing Registered Nurse, Etelka was keenly aware of a void in quality patient care that could be provided in the home. She embarked upon a journey to develop a home health care agency that would exceed all expectations and become a trusted partner to physicians and patients.
A Distinguished Career From Nurse to Director of Nursing to President of Home Services Unlimited
Etelka’s distinguished career followed a logical progression to her position as President of Home Services Unlimited. She graduated as a nurse practitioner with a Bachelor of Nursing (RN) in 1972 from Meshgorya University in the Ukraine, close to where she lived with her family. She married her husband Phil in 1973 and decided in 1977 that they would relocate to the United States to be closer to family and to come to this land of opportunity. With an eagerness to continue her budding career, Etelka sat for and passed her Boards in the U.S. in 1979.
A Love and Talent for Working with the Elderly
Etelka began her nursing career in the U.S. at Colonial Crest, now part of Golden Living, where shewasthe In-service Coordinator, the Director of Training and Education and Director of Nursing, a position she occupied for several years.
With a group of partners, she co-founded Adept Corporation, which operated group homes for the mentally challenged. The business was successful and in 1996, Etelka sold her share to return to her roots, caring for the elderly.
In January of 1997, Etelka opened Home Services Unlimited as a fully licensed business to provide home health care. In her quest to learn to do better for her patients, she had already obtained a Masters in Healthcare Administration (MHA) in May of 1990 from the College of St. Francis. As President of Home Services Unlimited, Inc., Etelka guides the trusted, experienced care model Home Services Unlimited uses to continue providing excellent home health care.
Giving Back to the Community of Indianapolis
Volunteering for community services is a high priority for Etelka. Her memberships include the Indiana Association of Rehabilitation Facilities, Executive Women in Health Care and the Indiana Association for Home and Hospice Care, where she is a member of the Board of Directors.
Etelka has also served on the Board of Directors with Hooverwood Home, a highly regarded geriatric facility, since 1997 and as the President for 2005-2006. Through her community work, she has received several awards and accolades, including the Nora McFarland award in 2002, from the Indiana Association of Home and Hospice Care.
Etelka was honored as a “Health Care Hero” by the Indianapolis Business Journal. The issue can be read online here:
http://mags.ibj.com/activemagazine/welcome/html/ibjhch.html.
After clicking on the link, then click on the image of the issue’s front page. After that, you can browse through the issue or click in a box near the top of your internet browser to adjust the page to 17, which is where Etelka’s article appears.
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