Johansen, Helle

Helle Juuel Johansen, Director of Care

New Vista Care Home, Burnaby, BC

Helle Juuel Johansen came to Canada from Denmark in 2002 with her husband and children planning to stay for 2 years. Thankfully they fell in love with Vancouver and decided to stay.

In January 2020 she became the new Director of Care at the New Vista Care Home in Burnaby and had no idea what was in store for her. April saw an outbreak of COVID-19 cases and one of her residents died. She had to deal with another outbreak 4 months later and then in October she oversaw the relocation of 230 residents to a new building.

She is truly one of the heroes of this pandemic and we are fortunate to have her join us to share some of her experiences, answer your questions and discuss with us quality of care issues in our long-term care home institutions.

 

Helle Johansen spoke to us in April, 2021.

Midsummer Festival

Each June we have a booth at the Midsummer Festival on the grounds of the Scandinavian Community Centre. In addition to handing out information about our club, we also sign up new members. Everyone is invited to come out to enjoy this fun annual event. If you have time available, why not consider volunteering to help with our booth?

Christmas Party

 

In December, instead of our usual monthly dinner meeting, we have our annual Christmas party. Our guests are welcomed into the hall by the cheerful sounds of the Runeberg Choir. We have a fabulous Scandinavian Christmas dinner, followed by dancing to live music.

Monthly Dinners

Our dinner schedule for 2024 will be: Feb 14th, Apr 10th, TBD. Social hour starts at 6:00pm, dinner at 7:00pm and the dinner speaker starts at about 8:00pm. The dinner is Scandinavian and usually starts with herring and salmon open-faced sandwich appetizers and ends with coffee/tea and delicious Scandinavian desserts. The theme for the after dinner talk is usually business related and hopefully with a Scandinavian connection but we also schedule other speakers of interest. Two meetings of the year we have no speaker. Instead, in February we have our Annual General meeting where we discuss business for the upcoming year and elect our new board of directors. In June, we have our annual joke-telling contest and discover who, among us, is the best teller of jokes.