Reimagining long-term care: radical or common sense?
Have you ever thought just how unnatural it is to ask people to stop being themselves overnight?
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Have you ever thought just how unnatural it is to ask people to stop being themselves overnight?
As in: stop following your daily routines and habits, stop eating the food you enjoy, stop socializing with people you know, stop following your internal clock, and, in some cases (a lot of cases), stop going outside.
It sounds unacceptable, but this is what we ask of people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s when they enter long-term care. Imagine living for nearly a century only to be told: sorry, you can’t do this anymore. Starting today, you have to conform to someone else’s schedule and routines. That “someone else” is an artificially organized system of care, based on a 24-hour clock and a list of tasks that staff in the care homes must perform.
Somewhere in between executing tasks and ensuring the health and safety of residents, we forgot about the HUMAN. This is why we chose to support Providence Living in their effort to shift long-term care to a social-relational model of care, one that aims to foster independence, joy, and daily personal routines for people in long-term care.
One-year anniversary celebration of the opening of Providence Living at The Views
How people live inside long-term care homes is dictated by policy and practice that are entirely focused on “keeping people safe”, but that “safety” has come at the cost of quality of life. In order to live a full life, there needs to be some degree of risk. Of course, receiving good personal and medical care is important, but so are social connections and doing things that give us comfort and joy. We all have our own unique tastes and preferences, meaning comfort and joy will look different, but long-term care should be able to adapt and accommodate.
Restaurant at the Hogeweyk dementia village in Weesp, Netherlands
It is a privilege to age. If we’re lucky, we all will join this cohort. Some of us will need institutional-level support; we’ll have to leave our homes. Let’s re-imagine what life in long-term care could look like. Let’s bring joy back into long-term care. It can be done. Eloy van Hal, and his colleagues at The Hogeweyk and Be Advice have shown, now for two decades, that there are a number of ways this can be done. The Hogeweyk dementia village in Weesp, Netherlands, remains the “gold standard”; join us in hearing firsthand from Eloy how non-revolutionary yet radically different this concept is. Watch below.
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