Saint Charles Borromeo Home
Four worlds under one roof
WORLD OF OLD AND SICK PEOPLE
WORLD OF NUNS
WORLD OF LAY STAFF
WORLD OF CONVICTED WOMEN
Short insight into history:
Lothringen country, after the thirty year war, devastated by misery, hunger and all kind of diseases... Human solidarity creates spontaneously small iles of help and hope; from a small group of Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo in Nancy, a larger community grows and roots in 1837 in Prague where the hospital Pod Petřínem and Congregation in Řepy are founded as a second province of the Sisters. Care for children and adults, and later on for 83 years, hands offerred to convicted women. Further activity was interrupted by the state forced exile of Sisters expelled to border region for 40 years. After the so called velvet revolution, the Sisters came back to provide new services for needed – sick and elderly, and also, in historical tradition, to cooperate with the Prison Service for the benefit of convicted women.
The Home today:
Saint Charles Borromeo Home is a church institution where four different worlds are joined to create quite a unique project. These are the Congregation of Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo, elderly and sick people, convicted women, and lay staff. These four worlds meet within the Home spaces to create together the environment of mutual help and cooperation.
The Home’s mission is to care for people who are sick and advanced in age. In order to fulfil the mission, we provide social and curative stays in the wards and day care centre. To the wards, we accept patients for transient period when their families are unable to secure a good quality care to their sick or not self-sufficient members. Within one year, more than 400 patients alternate on 92 beds meanwhile their families get the needed help in difficult situations.
1. WORLD OF OLD AND SICK PEOPLE
Social relieving stays for seniors
Many families or relatives who care for their close members get often into difficult situations when they are unable to secure relevant care for a transitory period, or they are exhausted and need a rest before they could provide further care. Sometimes it is necessary to bridge certain period from submitting the application for residence in a permanent institution when home care becomes impossible. Such need is a core idea of social interim stays. During the time when an elderly person is comitted to our care, we do our best to provide him/her with complex treatment which involves, apart from medical treatment, also physiotherapy, ergotherapy and cultural events to restore self-aid; we also offer spiritual aid, and, within possible limits, we respect individual needs of all entrusted to us.
Curative stays for seniors
We offer after treatment and rehabilitative stays to in-ward patients for period when they do not require acute medical care but cannot be without nurse care. In order to ease their transfer to their families in better condition or, at least in a stable condition to some residential social institution, we provide for them top quality care of our physicians and other medical staff together with basic condition rehabilitation. It involves also general activation and participation in cultural events; by means of loving milieu of spiritual services, the patients are accepted with all individual wishes and needs, the dying persons are surrounded with compassion and professionally administred palliative treatment.
Day care centre
Day visits to the pleasant day care centre also help families and elderlies who, during work days, spend their time there meanwhile their caring people are at work. Therefore they can live in their families and do not feel precociously expelled to a permanent medical institution. These are in general people advanced in age, incapable of self-aid and very often physicaly or mentaly handicapped, often with various kinds of dementia so they cannot be left at home on their own. During the visit in the day care centre, they are provided with not only all day nutrition and hygienic assistance but, above all, with ergotherapeutic and physiotherapeutic programmes, various activities which they can either watch or také part in; also the need of social contact within the group supervised by the kind staff is satisfied there.
Spiritual aid
We do not regard spiritual aid as a mere „extra bonus“ but consider it an essential and needed part of our service to all clients and patients. For us, spiritual aid is one of basic human needs which we try to fulfil according to individual personal demands.
Every elderly committed to our care has the full right to use spiritual help offered consisting of private discussions, lending spiritual literature, prayers in group or private, meetings with priest, taking the Holy Communion, direct attendance of services in our church or listening it via audio and video transfers, possibility of common prayer and spiritual guidance in general. He/she has also the right which usually cannot be any longer indicated by him/her and is, therefore, in that case our full obligation – the right to be guided in his/her last hours of life by our presence, compassion and prayers. Our care for dying persons does not end at providing hygienic and medical needs. It equally comprises understanding of their deepest and essential need which finally remains as the only and ultimate one – the reconciliation with others, with the own life and death – and to pass away peacefully, being aware of security.
The important aspect of spiritual care is a respectful relationship, equally complaisant and open to everybody’s mind, to persons of different communions and atheists. Everybody’s own conviction is to be highly esteemed by all of us.
2. WORLD OF NUNS
The Sisters` mission is very simple – strong by faith, efficiently serve all in need. It is really no matter who the needed are; it could be a sick or dying person, child or adult mentally or physically handicapped or deprived of freedom as well as a poor – either in spirit or health, someone who, perhaps, lives in materiál abundance but lacks the essential – purpose of life, love and assurance, sense and awareness of security.
Local community consists of the Sister Congregation. Some of them are employed in the Home, some, mostly elderly, help within their limits and create family background for the others. The Sisters are engaged in spiritual care for the patients, they work in the church, také part in the Home activities, meet people from vicinity, the staff, the patients and their visitors as well as the convicted women. The community of Sisters also lively cooperates with the local parish.
3. WORLD OF LAY STAFF AND VOLUNTEERS
In comparison with large hospitals, ours is relatively a small one, therefore it is more important to become successful in creating friendly, open and helping relationships. In every family, variety in characters, age and education exists naturally. The more this variety mediates the unity and enhencement and not parting lines, the more benefits gain our patients and ourselves too. We do not intend to change other people but to change ourselves, our mutual relationships, our work, our attitude towards the people entrusted to us. We would like to be an encouragement for each other and return home joyful from success; we would like to behave to our co-workers, as well as to ourselves, in a moderate, pleasant, kind, and tolerant manner.
The volunteers have been an important part of the St. Charles Borromeo Home from the beginning, and are connected to the staff and Borromean Sisters by cordial friendship. They help not only the patients but also the staff to organize cultural and social events. Volunteers are mostly students and retired people but also people in work age are among them. The volunteers do not bring money to the Home but they do create values.
4. WORLD OF CONVICTED WOMEN
The Prison Sentence Ward Repy as a part of the Custody Prison in Ruzyne is an indispensable part of St. Charles Borromeo Home. Convicted women thus actually stay in the Home where they have opportunity to work – mostly cleaning, gardening, laundry, kitchen work. Because the Home provides sick people care, there is a new opportunity for the clients of the Prison Service to work as sanitarian personnel – for that work there is a possibility of requalification in sanitarian training course. The certificate gained there is valid for application for the job in the new service in health/social institutions after serving the sentence. For resident Prison Sentece Ward, women are chosen based on psychological testing, their personal characteristics are assessed as well as the kind of the crime committed, expert opinions are considered. The Home enables them to participate in cultural events, concerts etc., they can touch spiritual values and the world of the Sisters. Especially nursing care for sick provides them a not yet usual opportunity for them – to think about life, illness, helplessness, old age, and dying. They touch real world, they are learning not only new working habits but also how to accept nice relationships and trust given them by their co-workers. All this very often causes the change of their attitude.
To be good to a convicted person means to give him/her a chance ....
Mutual meeting of many generations:
The Home environment provides background for mutual meetings and common cultural, spiritual and social events where the Home staff and volunteers také part in cooperation with the Prison Service clients, local inhabitants and parish communionists. Various types of schools come to visit our patients and attend various events organized for them – in range from small children up to university students.
Combination of all the activities creates a full cultural offer for the patients as well as for seniors and handicapped persons from the vicinity.
The Home also became a training centre for five sanitary schools where the students follow a good example of thorough work of our staff. Also we gladly give our time to numerous excursions from home and abroad which would like to learn interesting and effective connection between various types of health, social and training services.
All this brings also benefit for our patients who are pleased by the other people interest in them and the environment they live in. They do not feel expelled from the society and gladly give evidence how content they feel with us.
Financial sources
Neither in history nor today, fair and reliable level of such services could be covered only by financial sources from the state (subsidies, insurances). We are always dependent on support which we ourselves have to find, to ask and be always grateful for.
„Mercy is the compassion on another person misery but the feeling itself is not enough. Mercy is in will tending to the action, to real effort to eradicate other person misery and ills.“ St. Thomas Aquinas
Domov sv. Karla Boromejského
K Šancím 50/6
163 00 Praha 17 - Řepy
tel.: 235 323 248, 235 301 209
fax: 235 302 720
konsolata (@) domovrepy.cz
sekretariat (@) domovrepy.cz
www.domovrepy.cz
Bank connection:
GE Money Bank, Nádražní 344/23, Praha 5
Číslo účtu : 174-1950304504/0600
IBAN : CZ9306000001741950304504
SWIFT kod BIC: AGBACZPP