(Watch "World's
Untold Stories: Dementia Village" on CNN International on Sunday at 11.30
pm, 14July2013)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS:
· Dutch dementia facility shows new way of providing long
term care
· It lets residents roam while staff work in village shops
to keep an eye on them
· Living quarters are furnished to reflect a person's
younger days
· Health experts from across Europe and Japan are looking
at the Dutch model
Weesp,
Netherlands (CNN) - Theo
Visser was thirsty. He got up from his seat during the half-time break in a
soccer match to purchase a drink from the concession stand.
"There she was,
standing behind the bar," he recounts, 58 years later. "It was love
at first sight." Theo asked the young woman out to a movie - and the rest,
they say, is history.
It's quite a shame,
then, that Corrie Visser doesn't remember any of this. Or if she does, she
can't say so. Corrie is one of 152 residents at Hogewey, a cutting-edge elder
care facility on the outskirts of Weesp, the Netherlands, just minutes from
downtown Amsterdam.
'Dementia Village' - as
it has become known - is a place where residents can live a seemingly normal
life, but in reality are being watched all the time. Caretakers staff the
restaurant, grocery store, hair salon and theatre - although the residents
don't always realize they are carers - and are also watching in the residents'
living quarters.
Residents are allowed to
roam freely around the courtyard-like grounds with its landscaped trees,
fountains and benches - but they can't leave the premises.
Their two-story
dormitory-style homes form a perimeter wall for the village, meaning there is
no way a resident can accidentally wander out.
And if they do approach
the one exit door, a staffer will politely suggest the door is locked and
propose another route.
Placing an aging family
member here is far less expensive than round-the-clock, in-home care. It also
takes an enormous amount of stress off family members who don't have ample time
or proper training to care for their loved ones.
Corrie has received a
diagnosis of severe dementia, meaning she requires attention and support 24
hours a day. That clinical indication is necessary to gain admittance into
Hogewey.
The burden of caring for
Corrie eventually became unmanageable for Theo and his daughters, so together,
they made the decision to place her here.
He says: "It's
perfect. I wouldn't know a better place for her. It's 100% good."
Nearly every day of the
week, Theo drives 15 kilometers (10 miles) each way to spend a few hours with
his 80-year-old wife.
"I do it for
myself," he says. "I need it for myself. She (still) recognizes
everyone... so it's important I be here every day."
Although they can't chat
with each other, Theo and Corrie will often sit for hours, holding hands and
lovingly look into each other's eyes. Every so often, Corrie offers a smile, a
laugh, a squeeze of the hand. At least part of her memory, it seems, is still
intact, though she can't verbalize much these days.
Like other residents of
Hogewey, Corrie may not know exactly where she is, but she always feels right
at home. That's precisely the idea.
For Yvonne van
Amerongen, one of Hogewey's Founders, the need to create the small village was
deeply personal.
"It was the moment
my mother called me and told me my father had passed away suddenly," she
recalls. "Nothing was wrong with him. He just had a heart attack and he
died. One of the first things I thought was, 'Thank God he never had to be in a
nursing home.' That's crazy that I have to think that!
I'm in the management of
a nursing home and I don't want my father to come here."
Van Amerongen sat down
with her colleagues in November 1992 to discuss how they could transform the
typical nursing home into more worthwhile living.
They created a 1.5
hectare (four-acre) complex, completed in 2009, that is home to 23 housing
units and seven different "lifestyle themes," such as crafts,
culture, religious and urban.
Art lovers get paintings
on the walls and music is always playing while the religious get more conservative
décor and Christian crosses on the walls.
The simple goal: provide the most normal possible life,
reminiscent of each individual's formative years.
From the furnishing of
her unit to the decorations and the type of food served, Corrie is led to
believe that nothing in her life has changed. It's this sense of normalcy that
they strive for day in and day out at Hogewey.
In some ways, this is
similar to the manufactured reality depicted in the movie "The Truman
Show," where a man played by Jim Carrey discovers his entire life is
actually a TV program. Everything he thinks is real is in fact a mirage,
created by television producers for the viewing public's entertainment.
Van Amerongen dismisses
any accusations that she and her staff are duping their residents. "We
have a real society here," she says. "I don't think people feel
fooled. They feel fooled if we just tell them a story that's not true and they
know it. We're not telling stories."
But telling stories is
exactly what some of the residents do, all day long, including Corrie's
housemate, Jo Verhoef. Like all of Hogewey's residents, Jo's dementia is
rapidly progressing. Her "loop" is getting shorter; the conversations
she carries and the questions she asks are becoming more repetitive in a
shorter amount of time.
"Do you know Steve
Matthews?" she asks, multiple times over the course of an hour. Of course,
no one does, but each time she seems surprised that we haven't met.
Steve may be a relic of
Jo's past, a distant, foggy memory of a baseball player she says lived with her
for a short time when she was younger. Or, he may be a figment of her
imagination. Sadly, we'll never know.
Worldwide, 35.6 million
people have dementia, according to the World Health Organization, with 7.7
million new cases being diagnosed every year. At that rate, the number of
people with dementia is expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050. This will
be an additional burden for governments already struggling to contain the
runaway costs of health care.
In Holland, everyone
pays into the state health care system during their working years, with the
money then disbursed to pay for later-in-life expenses - and that means living
in Hogewey does not cost any more than a traditional nursing home.
Could this innovative
model work in other countries? Health care industry leaders in Germany,
England, Switzerland and Japan are all beginning to take notice. At Hogewey,
says van Amerongen, "We have Dutch design, Dutch cultures, Dutch
lifestyles, but the concept is to value the person, the individual ... to
support them to live their life as usual, and you can do that anywhere."
On a physical level,
residents at Hogewey require fewer medications; they eat better, and yes, they
live longer. On a mental level, they also seem to have more joy. It's a
difficult thing to measure, but that is the most important thing here at
Hogewey.
So could this work in
other parts of the world? That's the next question.
(Source: By Ben Tinker, CNN, 14 July 2013)
No comments:
Post a Comment