Whenever I am in a nursing facility, I look to make connections of those in a room or area to others. One day, I was in a room where the nursing staff were bringing in residents for a "feeding" group. They were all apathetic, while sitting next to each other, they were not at all engaged. I began to introduce residents to each other in the group, with a "hello", smile, handshake. As individuals were brought into the room, I introduced them. At one point a resident was brought in and I hadn't quickly introduced him to the group, he quickly said, "Hey, you forgot me". It isn't much, but it began a whole new dialogue between these individuals who had no connection with one another. It takes only moments to do this. Another time, I delivered trays to resident rooms. Before I lifted the cover on the plate, I asked the person if she could guess the contents. Within a few moments, we had a fun conversation about what it could be.  When I brought the second tray into the woman sitting next to her who had paid close attention to the first interaction, I started to remove the cover, assuming she knew what the plate contained, but she quickly stopped me and said, "Aren't you going to have me guess too?" thinking quickly, I asked her if she thought she had the same dinner as her roommate. She responded with "I don't know, but let's find out". Again, this wasn't time consuming, hard to manage, but created a bridge and interaction that was personal and encouraged socialization. We should be doing more of this....