Nursing Home Residents’ Favorite Pastime

Guest post written by Belinda Allen

The stereotype of nursing home residents sitting around and putting together puzzles or playing checkers for fun couldn’t be any more wrong. I know this because I work at a nursing home.

Most of our residents have their own computers and spend a lot of their time on wildblue satellite either reading news, e-mailing loved ones or listening to music. A lot of times when I make my rounds, residents will tell me about interesting news stories they’ve read online that I haven’t even heard of before. They keep me pretty informed!

But many of them love to use wildblue satellite internet the most to keep up with friends and relatives on Facebook. So many residents live far away from their families and even though many of them are regularly visited by relatives, they can feel disconnected from their families sometimes. With Facebook, a lot of the residents learn about what their relatives and friends are doing and can keep in better touch.

There’s nothing like seeing a loved one and visiting with them in real life. But for our residents, Facebook fills in the sometimes-long gaps in between visits.