The Ottawa Rotary Home

For close to thirty years The Ottawa Rotary Home has been providing short term, twenty-four hour respite services to families caring for a loved one with a disability at home.

The Rotary Home’s mission is to improve the quality of life of caregivers and individuals with disabilities through a family centered approach that is responsive to individual needs and offered in a dynamic and flexible way.

The Home offers a variety of respite care programs designed to meet the unique needs of families with children, youth or adults with disabilities. The Home’s Bank Street campus is a spacious, modern facility with separate wings for children and adults. The children’s wing has 13 beds and the adult side has 8 beds. The Rotary Home’s smaller Rochester Street campus offers residential care to 8 adults living with disabilities.

Caring for a dependent family member with severe disabilities can be very stressful and demanding. The Rotary Home allows parents to have a break and recharge for a few hours or days at a time while their child with a disability is cared for by the Home’s highly trained and experienced staff. These respite breaks are essential to the health and wellbeing of the parents, the person with the disability and to other family members.

To learn more about The Ottawa Rotary Home and its programs, please visit www.rotaryhome.on.ca.

The History of the Rotary Home
Supporting families whose children have physical disabilities and complex medical needs is a sign of a caring community. And the people of Ottawa have shown through the years that they care. The Ottawa Rotary Home, incorporated in 1982, was the first 24-hour out-of-home respite centre for children with physical disabilities in North America. Led by local Rotarians, it has proudly served as the model for respite programs across the continent.

The original eight-bed Rotary Home was located in a bright bungalow in central Ottawa. As demand for the Home’s programs grew, three additional beds and round-the-clock nursing staff were added to enable the Home to care for clients with complex medical needs. But still, the demand for the Home’s respite services continued to far exceed the organization’s capacity.

The children’s services were in great demand, but an additional concern began mounting over the years as well. Thanks in part to medical advances, many children and youth with severe disabilities were living longer and healthier lives. But for many of the Home’s clients, the passage into adulthood does not translate into the ability to care for oneself and live independently. And because the Home’s original programs were designed for children only, once the individual with the disability turned twenty-one, they and their families were no longer eligible to access the respite care services provided by the Rotary Home. These families were faced with very few long-term housing options, very expensive day programs and virtually no respite.

With the opening of the Home’s current facility in February 2009, the organization was able to begin offering a limited, but regular schedule of adult respite programs to families in the Eastern Ontario region. The Ottawa Rotary Home Foundation is working with the Home to raise funds from the community to ensure that these services are available to the families that rely on them. Our aim is to one day be able to offer families access to the overnight adult respite program full-time, throughout the year (at present this program runs for 10-14 days each month and dozens of families are on a waiting list to access these services).