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Find care details, insights, and insider perspectives gained from 20+ years of helping seniors and families.
What to know about this topic:
- The benefits of assisted living in a retirement home
- Ensuring you find the best care available
- Costs of assisted living care in Greater Vancouver: a survey
- Regarding the move into Vancouver assisted living
Find the very best in assisted living facilities in Vancouver here. Homes listed here offer the best retirement care imaginable for families and seniors who want relief from some of the problems faced by deteriorating health or other concerns of aging. You'll have an improved life, living with access to round-the-clock care, in an environment designed with people like you in mind. Many seniors feel revived and renewed in assisted living care offered in Vancouver retirement communities.
IN-DEPTH REPORTSAssisted living in Greater Vancouver
Tapestry at Wesbrook Village
Tapestry at Wesbrook VIllage is an active aging community that offers residents unlimited opportunities to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle and improve their physical, mental and social well-being.
Lifestyle Options: Independent Living, Assisted Living
Tapestry at Arbutus Walk
Tapestry at Arbutus Walk is an active aging community that offers residents unlimited opportunities to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle and improve their physical, mental and social well-being.
Lifestyle Options: Independent Living, Assisted Living
Amica West Vancouver
Tucked away between the North Shore Mountains and Pacific Ocean, our residence offers the best of West Vancouver. Enjoy access to trails and shopping—a comfortable yet sophisticated lifestyle at Amica West Vancouver.
Lifestyle Options: Independent Living, Assisted Living, Long-term care
Courtyard Gardens - Verve Senior Living
Courtyard Gardens offers an enriching community, with quality staff & friendly & caring environment. 107 Private & Subsidized suites in Assisted Living, 31 Private Pay Extended Care studio suites & 1 Respite Suite.
Lifestyle Options: Independent Living, Assisted Living, Long-term care
Thornebridge Gardens - Verve Senior Living
Thornebridge Gardens is one of New Westminster’s finest retirement residences, providing luxurious, worry-free surroundings with life enriching services that inspire healthy senior living. Many options are available!
Lifestyle Options: Independent Living, Assisted Living
Granville Gardens - Verve Senior Living
Located in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale neighbourhood, Granville Gardens offers residents the opportunity to stay active and live in a well-appointed urban community, surrounded by shopping centres, parks, community centres.
Lifestyle Options: Independent Living, Assisted Living
The benefits of assisted living in a retirement home
Care you receive in one of these homes will include one or several of the following:
- Help with mobility concerns, such as transfer assistance
- Help with personal needs including bathing, dressing, grooming and/or feeding
- Administration of daily medication
These assisted living facilities will also offer three meals a day, housekeeping and other help with daily care requirements. All of these help improve the health and outlook for seniors, with these residences doing all they can to help seniors get back on track or to simply improve daily life. In many cases, all of these amenities are covered under one monthly cost, which also makes life simpler.
Some above-and-beyond features of some residences:
- Fitness and exercise rooms where you can rebuild or maintain strength and conditioning, work out with friends, and stay fit
- Hairdressing salons where you can have your hair done as often as you like. Studies show that personal care improves people's overall well-being.
- Pubs or bars or other spacious lounges where you can socialize with other people in the residence. This is also important to help improve your overall health.
In addition, many residences are located near walking trails or have landscaped gardens onsite, with well-groomed paths so you can enjoy the beauty of the Vancouver outdoors. Outside time in the temperate BC climate is known to have many beneficial effects for health, also.
Ensuring you find the best care available
All assisted living homes in Vancouver and the rest of BC are monitored by government services and are regulated by the provincial government. In addition, the BCSLA offers the Assisted Living Registry (as of 2006); look for this seal of approval to ensure that the residence you are looking at meets both official and voluntary standards. You'll know that you are getting the very best care.
Many of the homes listed here are on BCSLA's Registry and offer exceptional services, in addition. Consider some of the features and amenities, below, included with some residences. Living in this kind of environment will help revitalize and reinvigorate you.
Tools to help you choose
Costs of assisted living care in Greater Vancouver: a survey
This overview of costs provides samples only. These are monthly rates that provide a one-umbrella overall price that covers all of your daily and weekly expenses.
City | Starting cost/month | What's offered |
Vancouver proper | $4070 | Basic housekeeping and communal dining, with specific care options priced individually |
Burnaby | $3800 | Basic housekeeping and three daily meals, with specific assistance options extra |
Vancouver Island | $4510 | Bathing, dressing assistance & more |
Consider all the expenses that are covered by this price. When you move into a retirement home, you are no longer paying all of the monthly bills that you covered when you lived in your own home, including property taxes, heat and hydro, home maintenance and the many other household expenses that come out of your income.
You can compare costs in Vancouver to that of other BC cities inour look at all BC assisted living costs.
Regarding the move into Vancouver assisted living
Seniors in assisted living must be capable of directing care, making individual decisions and explaining needs to care or nursing staff. People who are assigned to assisted living care have needs very different from those in memory care or long-term care (where needs are greater). This is part of the continuum of care, falling in between those continuing care needs and independent living. Anyone in assisted living must also be able to respond to emergency alarms, for example, but will require one or two types of daily specialised care.
The move into assisted living care can be a difficult one for families and senior family members needing to move. Many times, though, this is a great improvement over remaining in your own home. Facilities tend to be newer and cleaner and are designed for optimum accessibility, safety and security. Vancouver seniors who want to remain in their own home may be doing so at their own jeopardy, where homes are often not ideally designed for elderly people. Some typical problems that seniors may face include narrow or steeply sloping stairs, old carpeting that is roughly worn, icy outside steps and walks, and more.
Seniors may have some resistance to the idea of moving but if you tour local residences you may be amazed at what retirement living is now like. Margaret is a Vancouver senior who moved into a retirement residence listed at Comfort Life. "I found I was losing my eyesight and I could no longer shop or make meals for myself, those kind of things," she told us. Moving into assisted living care was not an easy thing to do, but "you make your adjustments. I think I love it here now. The people are very nice and I've made some wonderful new friends."
Are you ready to move?
In our new guide, we look at facing some last minute fears, how communities welcome people, getting the full benefit of this life-change and more.
Take a full look at how to adjust to assisted living.
The quality of care and amenities is also very comforting to families who move parents and grandparents into a Vancouver assisted living residence. "Our mother had come to a very vulnerable time of her life," says Esther, who moved her mother after a fall. "We've seen her regain some of her strength in this wonderful environment, and she's found it so comforting to be surrounded by people – staff and new friends – who understand her needs. None of that would have been possible anywhere else."