The Dutch Village Where Everyone Has Dementia

SeaBreeze

SeaBreeze

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Here's a story about a Dutch village, where everyone has dementia...http://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...veryone-has-dementia/382195/?single_page=true


In traditional nursing homes, with their clinical appearance, the situation is openly communicated to residents—you’re sick, you can’t take care of yourself,you’re forgetting things again. But in Hogewey, the residents live in a place that looks and feels like home, even though it’s not; what others know to be a façade, they see as reality, which may help them to feel normal even in the midst of their disease.

Psychologist Donald Spence defines the concept of “narrative reality” as the ways in which stories and places help link the “true” world to one that a person is better able to understand, using storytelling as a vehicle to understand the truth—you’re in a place that’s holistically normal, you’re not lost, etc.How much of dementia is a result of disease, and how much is a result of how we treat it?

In the years since Hogewey’s founding, dementia experts from the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and Australia have all flocked to the unassuming Dutch town in the hopes of finding a blueprint for handling the global problem. While dementia-only living facilities have been created outside the Netherlands, none of them have offered the amenities or level of care per patient that Hogeway provides.

Last year, inspired by Hogewey, a nursing home in Fartown, England, built a 1950s village for its residents; a similar project is underway in Wiedlisbach, Switzerland. But because cost is one of the greatest barriers to making self-contained villages the standard in dementia care, it would be extremely difficult to implement in a non-socialized healthcare system—meaning that in the U.S., a facility like Hogewey might be impossible for the forseeable future.

A few years ago, I watched my grandmother’s memory erode in a nursing home of the kind that Yvonne van Amerongen had tried to get away from. My grandmother had the medicine cabinet of a septuagenarian, and the progression of her dementia was predictable and not altogether different from the experience of numerous others. But she spent her last days in a nondescript building where doctors told her what she wasn’t, rather than what she was. She couldn’t live on her own, but she decimated us at Scrabble (like always) a few days before she passed away.

Glimpses of lucidity like that make the relatives of people with dementia yearn for an environment built around life rather than death. Hogewey hasn’t found a cure for dementia, but it’s found a path that’s changing ideas of how to treat those who can no longer take care of themselves.

“This is a terrible disease, but this place makes me a little less scared of it," Elly Goedhart, the daughter of a Hogewey resident, told Time in February.
Sometimes it truly does take a village.
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This would really be beneficial to some of the residents I have in the nursing home I work in. Some of them want to go to a restaurant at 10PM. Or they wander the halls. A few ambulatory. Most in wheelchairs. It would be nice if there were places they could go and just wander safely.

One nursing home I worked at closed their nice secured (locked) unit to make the rooms into medicare rooms for more profit. Weather permitting the door to the enclosed yard was always open and people could go in and out as they wanted.
 

The thing about dementia is you don't really KNOW where you are. You are wherever your mind tells you that you are. I have worked with dementia patients.. It's sad to watch, but in reality, these people are unaware of reality. Beatrice wonders the deck of a ship looking for her husband. Edward is at his job. John is at a train station waiting for the 6:15. Ethyl is taking care of her babies and folding their diapers over and over. Redirecting them to reality is futile or if at all possible.. it's brief. The best is to keep them safe and away from predators out on the streets, or to keep them from hurting themselves. It's a sad disease.
 
More about this village. http://www.boredpanda.com/dementia-village-for-elderly-de-hogeweyk/


dementia-village-for-elderly-de-hogeweyk-17.jpg
 
The other problem is the "COST" of care. There are not many I am sure who can afford $5000 to $10,000 a month which is what it would cost to place my mother in a situation like this. I would love to have my mother in a place like this where I could go visit rather than have to look after her as I'm doing now, but meager savings just don't permit it. And then I've read somewhere that many of these facilities want 2 years of costs in advance? Bull dinky.

All these assisted living facilities here in the U.S. think that people are made of money and that they should be the ones to have it all and only the wealthy know how to protect assets so that someone else pays the cost and not them. If your family is like mine, no house, little savings etc. you're stuck up a creek without a paddle.

While I may not be happy with my current situation, I will not pay $10,000 a month for my mother's care (her money would be gone in less than a year) . .. that is ridiculous, especially not for someone who is mobile and still has a good portion of her wits about her. I will keep her off the taxpayer's dole for as long as I can and if at any point she does become immobile or need medical care that she can only receive in a NH, then so be it.

How I handle my own care remains to be seen.
 
From what I've witnessed in the last 2 months, and from the information given... In order for this living arrangement to work, the level of dementia would have to be in such early stages, that these folks are not even near ready for a nursing home to begin with, maybe not even ready for assisted living. This disease is bad.
 
But maybe there are some inexpensive things, cosmetic ideas that could be adopted that would make the ones that we could afford for aging parents or for ourselves, that would still make them feel a little less clinical. Like instead of institutional pale yellow with rose carpet, they could be a little more imaginative, warmer, richer colours. Better artwork...pick furniture that is cleanable and attractive.... must be some things wouldn't you think?
 
I am surprised more of these type of care areas are not being set up. It seems that the feeling of having a close community to live in with assistance all around is a smart way to help an aging population. If I were to live in one I would want everything to remind me of the good old day, maybe they can set up time zone specific towns and keep people suffering from dementia reliving their glory days. My family has been touched by Alzheimer's and dementia recently and its good to read something positive in that area happening. Thank you for the share SeaBreeze!
 

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