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St. Thomas Retirement Homes & Communities

Find great senior care here

You've lived in the St Thomas area all your life and now you find yourself needing a retirement home. Prepare to be pleasantly surprised by the excellent senior care available in the city. Seniors from Aylmer to Port Bruce to Port Stanley find the right care and community here. 

An overview of care available in and around St. Thomas

Independent living is the choice made by people who no longer want to cook meals for themselves, do their own dishes, cut their own grass … all those pesky little daily details. When you leave all these behind, you find you have a lot more time to enjoy life. Moving into communal living gives you a new community of friends and you suddenly find that there is a whole host of things to do every day.

Seniors who have been slowed down by health problems find the move to assisted living the proper solution. There are several of these in St. Thomas. If you or your loved one has (have) trouble with anything from getting out of bed, to going to the bathroom, to feeding yourself, several St. Thomas retirement communities offer aid with these simple tasks of daily living.

Families facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or other serious type of dementia or degenerative disorder will find memory care or long term care communities in the city of St Thomas. 

Read all London area retirement home reviews before you commit to any retirement community in the area.

Investigate home care. Compare home care costs to the cost of moving into a retirement home. Home care is valuable initially, but as time goes on, illness or care needs can be exacerbated, and the move into a retirement community may become more sensible. Read more about this:

• How to make aging in place work
• Aging in place with home care support
• Testing the waters at a retirement community

Consider London retirement homes. The city of London offers more selection. It's only half an hour away, and there is easy access to the 401. Once you settle into one of the great retirement homes there, you'll find that you have everything you need under one roof. You might also consider other towns, which may be closer to family elsewhere nearby, such as Leamington or Dorchester.  

Basic advice on getting started

Here are links to resources for families and seniors in the early stages of looking at retirement homes:

Everything you need to know about selling your home. Learn all you can about seniors and real estate, including the value of working with a Master ASA or other experts in the area.

How to talk to parents about senior care. For families that are just starting out, and feel that mom or dad will put up some resistance, be sure to review our video on how to talk to aging parents about senior care.

Find out what seniors say about life in senior care. For seniors who feel leery about the idea of a moving into senior care, you ought to find it comforting to hear from other seniors who share their stories of how they adapted to life in a retirement home and how it ended up making their life much better than living on their own.  

How to test out senior living in St. Thomas

There are two separate ways of taking a short term stay in a retirement community:

Post-surgery convalescence in a retirement home in St Thomas. For people who have had surgery for hip replacement or knee replacement, a convalescent stay is the ideal way to make sure that you get care around the clock, and get a look at what life in a local retirement home is really like. It can be a great eye-opener!

Respite care stays are also short term stays but these are more often arranged by a caregiver, or arranged with a caregiver's needs in mind. This gives adult children of elderly parents a break from caregiving. If you qualify, these can be funded by the Ontario government. You can learn much more about this and other things from the St. Thomas and area LHIN.