Words by Maya Field (she/her)
When I told people that I worked in a retirement village, specifically a bartender in a retirement village, it’s met with much more interest than previous jobs. It’s understandable. Bartender? Run-of-the-mill job, slightly cooler than a regular server. Bartender in a retirement village? Now that’s something to write a book about. It’s a standard student job placed in a weird, non-standard student setting. The jokes write themselves.
My job involved pouring glasses of wine, making gin and tonics, and giving the residents their plates of fish and chips. It wasn’t the most important job in the village, but it made me very popular with the residents. The worst parts of my job were the long commute and the instinctual worry for a resident if I hadn’t seen them in a while. Although, I think only one resident that I interacted with passed away while I worked there. For the most part, I loved my job. I gained transferable hospitality skills, while also serving a wider community. As someone who was very close to my grandparents, who have all passed away, I found working with the elderly incredibly natural and rewarding. My time at the retirement village consists of funny stories, some of the best coworkers I’ve ever worked with, and payslips for just over minimum wage.
I got the odd bad moment: I wasn’t trained in first-aid or how to help someone with Alzheimer’s, I didn’t even know where to find a nurse for the first six months, so I was pretty useless anytime someone needed anything beyond a glass of wine. One time a resident fell outside of his apartment, all I could do was tell reception (who told a nurse, and the man was fine). No one showed me the layout of the village outside of the bar and the kitchen, so I was just as lost as the residents in the dementia unit. One resident mistook me for a nurse multiple times in one night, asking for her pills so she could sleep. I had absolutely no idea how to help her. Eventually an actual nurse (or caregiver) appeared, but I couldn’t shake that feeling of utter uselessness.
You can’t help but feel a great sense of responsibility to these people, even if you’re just serving them drinks on a Friday night. Their ages ranged anywhere from early seventies to late nineties. Their capabilities were not necessarily reflective of their ages. An 86 year old could handle a whole bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and get back to their townhouse safely, while someone just a year or so younger needed reminding of where their apartment was, just after a couple of glasses of wine. Even without alcohol, the limited capabilities of some residents compared to others was (pardon the pun) sobering.
At least one in 10 people over the age of 65 in Aotearoa experience some form of elder abuse, and due to the amount of incidents going unreported, that number is likely to be higher. Family members account for over 70 percent of perpetrators in elder abuse cases. Often, the stress of being a carer for an elderly relative is associated with elder abuse (although the WHO feels that there is risk in over-associating stress with elder abuse). Even in the times where that one woman would criticise my bingo-calling, there is still a great sense of responsibility and care for the residents, a desire to help and reassure a community wider than yourself.
There’s another group in retirement villages who encounter abuse that needs to be spotlighted: the workers themselves.
A 2018 Study from the US found that healthcare and social service workers are ‘5 times as likely to suffer a workplace violence injury than workers overall’ (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). According to a Survey on the Psychosocial Risks of Healthcare Workers (WorkSafe, 2023), over half of the 1,067 healthcare workers surveyed reported ‘at least one offensive behaviour in the 12 months prior to the survey.’ It found that threats of violence were the most common form at 34%, followed by bullying (33%) and then sexual harassment (12%). Asked to score their mental wellbeing on a scale from 0 to 100 (100 being best possible level, 0 being the worst), 47.1% reported a score of 50 or below.
An American study from 2018 (Journal of Applied Gerontology) interviewed workers (both healthcare and administrative) found that while it was extremely common for workers to experience sexual harassment, it would often be minimised by the workers, because ‘when patients are perceived as vulnerable, confused, or in pain, their actions are minimized or excused [...] It is only when nurses perceive the behaviour as intentional and likely to reoccur, that it is defined as sexual harassment’.
The WorkSafe survey wasn’t all bad. It also found that there were high amounts of positive psychosocial factors reported by healthcare workers, which helped support their mental wellbeing. These factors include a sense of community at work, possibilities for development, and a high sense of meaning from their work. That last factor, the higher meaning of work, is interesting. While I can’t speak for healthcare workers specifically, I can attest that even working as a host at retirement village, a more social than care role, there’s still a sense of meaning from it, simply because you’re serving others. It’s a workplace where it’s not about gaining clients or growing a portfolio (I don’t know business terms, but that sounds right), but rather, a place where the needs of others are the focus. There’s just this inherent sense of meaning, a sense of doing something bigger than yourself, when your job is to serve and help others, rather than sell something to them.
There’s a real difficulty when it comes to working nowadays, because despite the generally agreed upon principles of the importance of serving others, of human decency and compassion, people can still be assholes, and that assholery feels worse now than it did ten, even five years ago. Healthcare workers are especially caught in this tug-of-war difficulty. Of course, we all want to help others and care for those in need of care, but it’s hard to do so when someone could bite your head off for getting their meals mixed up or not knowing how to find their keys.
Health Minister Shane Reti responded to the growing rates of abuse in 2023 with more security guards in Emergency Departments and other high-risk areas in hospitals (the amount of security was reduced later in 2024). At the time, Anne Daniels, the Nurses Organisation president, said that while the extra security was important, it was a Band-Aid solution, when really, what would help would be more doctors and nurses. Perhaps that hospital in Dunedin could help. Until that day in the unforeseeable future, it seems that the best solution (and the hardest) is for everyone to be nicer, to appreciate those who are trying to help, and to help those who need it.
Sources
Burgess, Elisabeth O. et al. ‘“That Is So Common Everyday . . . Everywhere You Go”: Sexual Harassment of Workers in Assisted Living’. Journal of Applied Gerontology 37.4 (2018): 397–418. SAGE Journals. Web.
‘Extra Security for Most High-Risk Hospital Emergency Departments Almost Halved’. RNZ. N.p., 19 Apr. 2024. Web. 10 Feb. 2025.
‘The Role and Current State of MSD’s Elder Abuse’. n. pag. Print.
‘Workplace Violence in Healthcare, 2018’. Bureau of Labor Statistics. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Jan. 2025.
Zealand, WorkSafe New. ‘A Psychosocial Survey of Healthcare Workers’. WorkSafe. N.p., 2 May 2024. Web. 10 Feb. 2025.