Horses for happiness

Riverview

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This article was published 13/09/2023 (916 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not every day you see horses in Riverview.

However, on Sept. 6, miniature horses Basil and Bracken made a house call at the Riverview Health Centre (1 Morley Ave.) to visit with residents in the centre’s residential and palliative care units. The horses travelled from room to room, sniffing the hands and brightening the moods of both residents and health-care workers on the first and second floors.

Although the centre has welcomed other animals, including dogs, this is the first time it’s been able to welcome the equine into their halls.

Chris Edwards, RHC’s therapeutic recreation facilitator, described the event as a good example of the “human experience,” and noted it as a helpful break in the routine for the residents.

The visit, organized by the therapeutic recreation team, was the idea of team-member and RHC resident Ricky Bains, who said that he had seen the horses three weeks earlier and thought it would be a good idea to invite them back to the centre.

Bains works closely with Edwards and the recreation team. An avid gardener, the resident was also the mind behind an indoor garden, monarch enclosure, and field trips out to The Leaf and a couple Winnipeg Blue Bomber games. It’s been a big flip compared to the COVID-19 lockdown, where Bains once went as long as two weeks in his room.

“It’s been about three, four months since we’ve been able to start doing recreational activities again,” said Bridgette Parker, executive director of the RHC Foundation, as the people currently living at RHC are high-risk and could not gather until the mask mandate was lifted this year.

“(Since then), there’s been a lot of activity and action,” Parker said, listing a summer carnival, dog show, and opera performance as some previous examples. “It helps residents with mental health and socialization.”

A focus of RHC is accessibility, she said, and “ensuring the things that (the residents) had before Riverview, they can still have when they’re here.”

“We really want them to have the fullest life that they can,” she added.

For example, Parker said she hoped the horses, in particular, could do that for some rural residents through triggering happy memories from when they lived outside the city.

“You can tell by the attendance that it’s important,” Parker said. “There’s such a diverse population here, and a spectrum of what people can enjoy.”

“It’s important for us to build communities back and re-imagine what we do here,” Edwards said. “I’m the conduit, the inbetween, and (they) give the ideas so I can make them a reality … It would be easy for me to do it myself, but that’s not the goal. And it feels good. I see Ricky, and he’s proud, and our work isn’t done … but it feels good.”