Quality of life: A ‘dementia village’ in the Netherlands is changing the way we think about care and aging
Published in the Vancouver Sun, December 7th, 2014
Weesp is an idyllic Dutch town with narrow cobblestone streets, canals, windmills, stores selling wooden shoes, and cheese shops. But what has put Weesp on the map are not the tourist attractions, but a neighbourhood designed and built exclusively for people with advanced stages of dementia who can no longer live independently.
De Hogeweyk Dementia Village is designed around the concept of quality of life and has six to eight people living in a home each with their own bedroom and shared living room, dining room and bathing rooms.
In the morning, residents wake up at their own time and gather around the dining room table, choosing what they would like for breakfast. A popular choice is pancakes. During breakfast, the conversation often focuses on what activities the residents want to do for the rest of the day. Following breakfast, a resident goes shopping in the local supermarket for groceries to be used for lunch and dinner.
A freezer at the entrance of the grocery store has frozen ice cream treats to satisfy a sweet tooth. In the same store, personal items such as incontinence products, medical supplies and cleaning supplies are purchased for the homes.
Once the resident has purchased her items, she walks back to her residence with the aid of her shopping cart. The supermarket is located in The Passage, a two-storey marketplace complete with a café, restaurant and art studio.
The Rembrandt Art Studio welcomes residents who arrive at their own pace and schedule. In the art studio, seniors paint like the Dutch masters Van Gogh and Vermeer. The art studio offers its residents a warm beverage to help keep their attention. When the drink is finished and the art is complete, the residents make their way to another attraction allowing space for other residents to paint.
The marketplace is large enough to feel like a town square and is used for group activities on rainy days. A market stand sells fresh-cut flowers, a newsstand has the daily papers, and large canvases featuring abstract art decorate the empty spaces on the walls.
Leaving the Marketplace, Main Street has the look and feel of its namesake. The pedestrian walkway with cobblestones has a café, hardware store for repairing bikes, walkers and other mobility aids to independence.
A physiotherapist provides both individual restorative therapy and group fitness exercises classes. A doctor’s office is located on the main drag, as is a modern beauty salon. One store front is called Mozart Hall and is decorated in Louis XIV style with classy dining tables and chairs and chandeliers. The hall is used for music therapy where residents create their own musical entertainment, much like they would have before moving to the dementia village.
A theatre hosts performances by local musicians and entertainers who champ at the bit to add this venue to their resumé. Another storefront is an activities booking travel agent who arranges trips to Amsterdam, De Hague, Haarlem, Delft and other regional cities and cultural attractions.
The main restaurant is decorated like a hip spot with perfectly poured espresso coffees and delicious biscotti. The lunchtime buffet menu is available to residents and guests from the local town and is a popular local eatery. The food quality is the same or better than the finest local restaurants and is part of the vibrant local food scene. It is a cool place to go out for a meal, not just a place to have a meal with grandma.
The buildings have the look and feel like the neighbouring buildings of both apartments and industrial park. The sounds of children playing can be heard in the distance as a school is located across the street with a soccer pitch visible for the residents to watch.
The homes are designed around people from similar backgrounds to encourage new friendships, to decrease aggressive behaviours, and to increase the chance of people getting along based on speaking the same language from their similar life experience. Separate houses are designed for Indonesian residents, while others are from urban areas and another for people who spent their lives farming.
Each home has distinctive features that help residents identify their home. One doorfront has a pair of wooden shoes, a bird feeder, and a small planter box with tulips and a mailbox with a large number 5 indicating the address.
The homes have their own patio with sturdy tables and chairs, covered shelter and a garden, which have been beautifully maintained. Park benches line outdoor space that is interconnected to other gardens sharing a common pathway for outdoor activities like Bochi, gravel field, life-size chess set, and lots of places to sit and take a break to watch what others are doing and to enjoy the independence of the outdoors.
An elevator without buttons automatically transports residents to and from their residences equipped with a motion sensor and electronic door closure sensors.
Gone are all the characteristics of an institutional living environment. Long corridors have been replaced with pedestrian boulevards and wandering paths; there are no sterile looking shiny floors reflecting the fluorescent tube lighting above. Care aides dressed in hospital scrubs do not rush residents to a main dining room to make it to a meal on time.
As demographic trends advance, homes for the aged will transform the aging experience with new models of care, and innovative living environments dignifying the lives of people with severe memory impairments. Theses communities are based on the need for a global response to the looming Alzheimer’s disease crisis that will triple in the next 40 years. New ways of caring for seniors in purpose-built environments as well as new options for living at home longer will perhaps mean that tomorrow’s seniors may never need a traditional nursing home.
This is not just a business model. It is a different way of thinking about the way people with advanced dementia experience the aging journey.
The Dementia Village is operated by Vivium, which operates other sites in the area and previously tested many of the design elements and philosophies to living and approaches to caring that have given the site an international reputation as a leading place for how innovative dementia care changes perceptions of what is important to residents, staff and families.
The village is modelled after the open-minded societal values of The Netherlands. If you walk down streets of any village, past the tourist attractions, you will find all of the same elements of living a meaningful life that you find in the Dementia Village. What is unique is the avant garde philosophy that freedom equals happiness. The seniors in the village can come and go as they please. Everywhere is safe within De Hogeeweyk. No one can leave the community unnoticed. As most seniors with advanced dementia cannot independently enter society, why not invite society into their purpose built communities?
Dan Levitt is executive director of Tabor Village in Abbotsford and an adjunct professor in the Gerontology Department at Simon Fraser University.
Benches that Honour and Remember – Celebrating a Life
/in Family and FriendsIn 2015, we launched the Celebrate Life Bench Donation Program. Benches are placed throughout the Menno Place campus with bronze plaques honouring loved ones.
The Celebrate Life Bench Donation Program has been extremely successful as residents and family members have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to honour a loved one in this way. The donation covers the cost of the bench and enables Menno Place to furnish our outdoor gardens with elder-safe furniture that will endure through the weather and over the years.
Would you like to dedicate a bench to someone you love? For details click here.
Family & Friends Support Network
/in Family and FriendsThursday, February 19th – 1:30 – 2:30 at the Menno Home Chapel – Click for Campus Map
Come and join a group of people who are supporting each other as they are involved and caring for a resident at the Home or Hospital.
Local and international examples of person centered care for dementia residents
/in Family and FriendsTake a look at some stories that share the experience of person centered care.
1. Czorny Alzheimer Center, Surrey, BC
CBC Story: Person-Centered Care – Getting it Right for Dementia Patients
CBC: Click to Listen – 21 minutes
The Province: Unique Care Facility Looks More Like a Rural Retreat
Vancouver Sun: Tragedy Creates Alzheimer Centre
2. Hogeweyk, Weesp, The Netherlands
CNN’s World’s Untold Stories: Dementia Village
Hogeweyk Website
De Hogeweyk: Wikipedia
Person-Centered Care – What does it mean?
/in Family and Friends, NewsPerson centered care is a philosophy of providing care for the elderly that puts the individual at the centre of their own care. In this philosophy the needs of those who care for the elder are considered as central to the care of each individual.
Person centered practice has five primary focuses in order to succeed:
1. Getting to know the resident as a person
This focuses on building a relationship between the caregivers and the resident. A person centered health professional knows and understands a resident beyond their diagnosis, medical needs and personal needs.
2. Sharing of power and responsibility
This focus is on respecting preferences. It includes treating residents and their caregivers as partners when setting goals, planning care and making decisions about care and treatments.
3. Accessibility and flexibility
Here, the focus is on meeting resident’s individual needs by being sensitive to values, preference and expressed needs. This focus gives the resident and their caregivers choice by giving them timely, complete and accurate information in a manner they can understand so they can make choices about their care.
4. Coordination and integration
This is about teamwork. It includes working together to minimize duplication. It involves working seamlessly behind the scenes to maximize the resident’s experiences and to provide them with a positive experience.
5. Environment
The physical, cultural and organizational environment allows staff to function in a person centered manner.
Grateful Community Volunteer Celebrates 100th Birthday
/in 100 Years!, Family and Friends, NewsOn January 6, 2015, Siegfried Bartel smiled with content surrounded by his family and friends who celebrated his 100th Birthday.
Born in a time when the US House of Representatives was denying women the vote, neon tubes were patented and the first coast-to-coast long distance call was made, Siegfried has lived through the incredible and rapid changes of the 20th and 21st centuries. World War 1 had just begun to rage across Europe when Siegfried’s mother prayed a prayer of blessing upon her unborn child.
Growing up in Prussia (Poland) in a Mennonite community, Siegfried enjoyed a privileged life earned by the hard labour of his farming family. As a young boy, he watched his father extend grace to a man whose drunken negligence caused a train accident that took the lives of his mother and oldest brother.
It was natural for a man of German descent to enlist in the German Army and Siegfried did so in 1937 before the second world war. When the war erupted in September of 1939, he found himself in an army that eventually brought horrors to others and convinced Siegfried that pacifism was the only sane response to killing and war.
During the war, Siegfried married Erna and started a family. Seven boys were born into his family as Siegfried went back to farming to earn a living. In 1951, he received refugee help through Mennonite Central Committee (http://www.mcccanada.ca) to re-establish his life in Canada becoming a dairy farmer in Agassiz, BC. Siegfried became an active participant in the community as well as serving in leadership with MCC from 1972 – 1987, grateful for how he had received refugee help in his time of need.
Siegfried’s birthday celebration was a vibrant afternoon party with friends and residents from Menno Home joining in the festivities. Five sons, six daughter-in-laws, one grandson and one great-granddaughter and the staff of Menno Place celebrated as well. Siegfried’s older brother, Hans, age 103 came over from Primrose Gardens Apartments with his wife to celebrate his brother’s life and enjoy a delicious piece of home-made cake and some German music. Ingrid Schultz, Chaplain, shared highlights of Siegfried’s life of faith and a prayer of blessing upon his life and the lives of those who love him.
Siegfried is the author of two books, Living with Conviction and Journey to Pacifism. In these books, he shares his life’s story and resulting convictions about pacifism and dedication to others in need. Happy 100th Birthday, Siegfried from your friends at Menno Place, Abbotsford Retirement Home.
Families & Friends – You’re Invited! Concert in Care – January 6th, 2015
/in Events, Family and FriendsJanelle Nadeau, Harp
You’re invited to join a resident or tenant at Menno Place for this Concert in Care!
Tuesday, January 6th, 2015 at 10:30am
Menno Hospital Chapel (enter through the main entrance of Menno Hospital – 32945 Marshall Road)
Harpist Janelle Nadeau’s performances showcase a range of musical genres from Celtic, Spanish, classical and popular songs. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia with a major in Harp Performance. She is a member of the ensemble Winter Harp, a guest performer in various orchestras, and enjoys a career of performing around the lower mainland. Janelle was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Celebrity Cruises, has performed numerous solo tours and has won various awards. Her classical training, combined with her personal contemporary repertoire, provides a refreshing approach to the harp. Janelle’s small town farming roots are reflected in her warm engagement with each audience as she introduces each selection.
Seamstress Shares Gifts
/in NewsPublished by Matthew’s House
It looks like Christmas in Freda Teichroeb’s little apartment. She’s decorated her home with all the joy and flair of a true Christmas-lover: a festive wreath hangs on the door, another in the living room. Her table is covered in a pretty red and green tablecloth. At her window, a little decorated tree stands atop a table surrounded by more ornaments, a beautiful nativity set, and lit-up village houses. Christmas carols play softly in the background.
But Freda’s love of Christmas goes much deeper than surface decorations. At the heart of this season is the message of giving, and Freda lives this out all year round. It is a value that is borne out of her deep faith in God and a desire to share her gifts with others.
“All my life I’ve been a faithful giver, tithing and supporting missions,” she says. “Then when my health began to fail, I really talked to the Lord and asked how I could continue to serve and give.”
The answer came through her sewing machine. Freda has sewn all her life. She and her husband Henry, a school teacher, raised their three children in Saskatchewan and she sewed all their clothes including coats and snow suits.
“My daughter always said that she had the nicest Christmas dresses,” Freda recalls.
They moved to B.C. 30 years ago to be closer to Henry’s aging parents. Freda managed a gift shop in Sevenoaks Mall called The Panhandler and Henry managed Alliance Manor, a rental apartment for seniors. They attended the Alliance church and then Clearbrook M.B. Church where they are still members. Over the years, the Lord has blessed them with seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Now in their late 80s, health challenges have necessitated a change in lifestyle. Henry lives in an extended care home while Freda’s assisted living arrangement gives her both the support and the independence she needs. Throughout her life’s journeys, her little sewing machine has traveled with her, so it was only natural that the answer to her prayer was to use her sewing skills to bless others. It was also natural that her skills and her love of Christmas would come together.
Freda began to sew Christmas stockings. She began by sewing them for her children, filling them with crayons, socks and books. She’d wrap everything carefully so that they had something to unwrap. She enjoyed it so much, she decided to sew stockings for sick children in Vancouver. She sewed 50 stockings that were so enthusiastically received that she decided to sew more – 250 more.
Then this summer, while attending a Lady’s Tea, a woman who was familiar with her abilities asked if Freda would consider sewing stockings for the children at Matthew’s House in Abbotsford. Matthew’s House is a ‘home away from home’ that provides respite care for children with complex health care issues, giving parents a chance to rest and rejuvenate.
“I thought it was a wonderful idea, so I did!” she says.
It takes a commitment from the community to keep Matthew’s House running, costing $860,000 annually, all of which comes from generous donations. When Alan Cavin, resource development coordinator for Matthew’s House, first received a call from Freda about her idea, he was moved by her desire to share her gifts with the children at Matthew’s House.
“We really value Freda’s generosity and her creativity,” he says. “Each child connected to Matthew’s House will receive a stocking and she has made dozens more for us to use to raise funds for Matthew’s House.”
Each stocking is made from high quality fabric that has been pre-shrunk so that they can be washed. They are fully lined and come with a strong loop so they can be filled and hung from a mantle. In the two years since she began this project, she has sewn more than 1000 stockings and continues to sew more. When asked why she keeps on doing it, a smile lights her face.
“I really feel that the Lord guided me to know that children would get smiles and joy from these stockings,” she says. ‘In my heart, I am doing this for the Lord and I feel so good doing it for Matthew’s House.”
Freda’s Christmas stockings will be available at several Matthew’s House community events this season: December 5th and 6th at the Lepp Farm Market Christmas events and December 6 & 13 at Sevenoaks Mall. The cost of a stocking is a donation to Matthew’s House.
Is this the future for nursing homes?
/in seniors-interestQuality of life: A ‘dementia village’ in the Netherlands is changing the way we think about care and aging
Published in the Vancouver Sun, December 7th, 2014
Weesp is an idyllic Dutch town with narrow cobblestone streets, canals, windmills, stores selling wooden shoes, and cheese shops. But what has put Weesp on the map are not the tourist attractions, but a neighbourhood designed and built exclusively for people with advanced stages of dementia who can no longer live independently.
De Hogeweyk Dementia Village is designed around the concept of quality of life and has six to eight people living in a home each with their own bedroom and shared living room, dining room and bathing rooms.
In the morning, residents wake up at their own time and gather around the dining room table, choosing what they would like for breakfast. A popular choice is pancakes. During breakfast, the conversation often focuses on what activities the residents want to do for the rest of the day. Following breakfast, a resident goes shopping in the local supermarket for groceries to be used for lunch and dinner.
A freezer at the entrance of the grocery store has frozen ice cream treats to satisfy a sweet tooth. In the same store, personal items such as incontinence products, medical supplies and cleaning supplies are purchased for the homes.
Once the resident has purchased her items, she walks back to her residence with the aid of her shopping cart. The supermarket is located in The Passage, a two-storey marketplace complete with a café, restaurant and art studio.
The Rembrandt Art Studio welcomes residents who arrive at their own pace and schedule. In the art studio, seniors paint like the Dutch masters Van Gogh and Vermeer. The art studio offers its residents a warm beverage to help keep their attention. When the drink is finished and the art is complete, the residents make their way to another attraction allowing space for other residents to paint.
The marketplace is large enough to feel like a town square and is used for group activities on rainy days. A market stand sells fresh-cut flowers, a newsstand has the daily papers, and large canvases featuring abstract art decorate the empty spaces on the walls.
Leaving the Marketplace, Main Street has the look and feel of its namesake. The pedestrian walkway with cobblestones has a café, hardware store for repairing bikes, walkers and other mobility aids to independence.
A physiotherapist provides both individual restorative therapy and group fitness exercises classes. A doctor’s office is located on the main drag, as is a modern beauty salon. One store front is called Mozart Hall and is decorated in Louis XIV style with classy dining tables and chairs and chandeliers. The hall is used for music therapy where residents create their own musical entertainment, much like they would have before moving to the dementia village.
A theatre hosts performances by local musicians and entertainers who champ at the bit to add this venue to their resumé. Another storefront is an activities booking travel agent who arranges trips to Amsterdam, De Hague, Haarlem, Delft and other regional cities and cultural attractions.
The main restaurant is decorated like a hip spot with perfectly poured espresso coffees and delicious biscotti. The lunchtime buffet menu is available to residents and guests from the local town and is a popular local eatery. The food quality is the same or better than the finest local restaurants and is part of the vibrant local food scene. It is a cool place to go out for a meal, not just a place to have a meal with grandma.
The buildings have the look and feel like the neighbouring buildings of both apartments and industrial park. The sounds of children playing can be heard in the distance as a school is located across the street with a soccer pitch visible for the residents to watch.
The homes are designed around people from similar backgrounds to encourage new friendships, to decrease aggressive behaviours, and to increase the chance of people getting along based on speaking the same language from their similar life experience. Separate houses are designed for Indonesian residents, while others are from urban areas and another for people who spent their lives farming.
Each home has distinctive features that help residents identify their home. One doorfront has a pair of wooden shoes, a bird feeder, and a small planter box with tulips and a mailbox with a large number 5 indicating the address.
The homes have their own patio with sturdy tables and chairs, covered shelter and a garden, which have been beautifully maintained. Park benches line outdoor space that is interconnected to other gardens sharing a common pathway for outdoor activities like Bochi, gravel field, life-size chess set, and lots of places to sit and take a break to watch what others are doing and to enjoy the independence of the outdoors.
An elevator without buttons automatically transports residents to and from their residences equipped with a motion sensor and electronic door closure sensors.
Gone are all the characteristics of an institutional living environment. Long corridors have been replaced with pedestrian boulevards and wandering paths; there are no sterile looking shiny floors reflecting the fluorescent tube lighting above. Care aides dressed in hospital scrubs do not rush residents to a main dining room to make it to a meal on time.
As demographic trends advance, homes for the aged will transform the aging experience with new models of care, and innovative living environments dignifying the lives of people with severe memory impairments. Theses communities are based on the need for a global response to the looming Alzheimer’s disease crisis that will triple in the next 40 years. New ways of caring for seniors in purpose-built environments as well as new options for living at home longer will perhaps mean that tomorrow’s seniors may never need a traditional nursing home.
This is not just a business model. It is a different way of thinking about the way people with advanced dementia experience the aging journey.
The Dementia Village is operated by Vivium, which operates other sites in the area and previously tested many of the design elements and philosophies to living and approaches to caring that have given the site an international reputation as a leading place for how innovative dementia care changes perceptions of what is important to residents, staff and families.
The village is modelled after the open-minded societal values of The Netherlands. If you walk down streets of any village, past the tourist attractions, you will find all of the same elements of living a meaningful life that you find in the Dementia Village. What is unique is the avant garde philosophy that freedom equals happiness. The seniors in the village can come and go as they please. Everywhere is safe within De Hogeeweyk. No one can leave the community unnoticed. As most seniors with advanced dementia cannot independently enter society, why not invite society into their purpose built communities?
Dan Levitt is executive director of Tabor Village in Abbotsford and an adjunct professor in the Gerontology Department at Simon Fraser University.
Ballet Therapy for Seniors at Menno Place
/in Family and FriendsWhat an incredible opportunity for our residents at Menno Place to participate in the ballet therapy program that was featured on the Intergenerational Dance Project. This project was from the Centre for Education and Research on Aging at the University of the Fraser Valley. Lee Kwidzinski, Mission-based dance instructor is leading the children and our residents in a weekly dance class.
Christmas at Menno Place
/in Family and FriendsChristmas is a magical time at Menno Place with all the lights, decorations and Christmas spirit! Thank you to another set of elves who donated their time and talents to decorate and make everything so beautiful at the Fireside Cafe.