How smaller long-term care homes can help address big elder-care issues
CBC
There are 38,000 people waiting for a spot in long-term care homes in Ontario alone and the government is preparing to build hundreds of facilities to meet demand, but some say we should also be reshaping how elder care is offered.
"I would really challenge those that are investing in this to look at alternatives that are out of the box," said Tammy Allison, who runs a small long-term care home in Monclova, Ohio. "You can do long-term care differently and you can do it better. And we feel like we're doing that."
Many traditional nursing homes follow an institutional model and are designed to care for dozens of residents at a time.
They often have large dining rooms and a single serving time for meals, for example, and a common complaint among care workers in Canada is that they hardly have time to get residents up and dressed every morning. In 2017, the union Unifor had a campaign to raise awareness that workers only had six minutes per person on average to get residents up, dressed and to the dining room for breakfast.
In many long-term care homes, Mary Nicodemus would be awakened by 7 a.m. for breakfast. But that's not the case at her nursing home in Monclova. It's after 10 a.m. and Deanna Webb is doing Nicodemus's hair before making her some coffee and breakfast.
"Everybody gets up at different times during their lifetimes," said Webb, a caregiver at the home, where her official title is Elder Assistant. "Some people were night people and some people were morning people. And then you never know what type of night they had. They might have been up all night long, couldn't sleep or something, so we let them sleep in."
It's a model of nursing home care that allows people to live life in retirement as close as possible to the way they did in their adult lives. It starts with the building — small homes with just 10 or 12 seniors living in them — and extends throughout all aspects of life there.
Each resident has their own room and bathroom.
There are no long hallways or seniors in wheelchairs sitting around a nurse's station so they can be monitored. Almost nothing inside these homes looks like a hospital or institution.
Mary's home is one of five in their own little subdivision about 20 minutes southwest of Toledo run by a not-for-profit, Otterbein Senior Senior Lifestyle Choices. Called Green House Project homes, they are built based on a not-for-profit model of care that started 17 years ago. There are more than 70 of these neighbourhoods either running or being built in the U.S., and operated by different organizations.
Another resident, Annette Coker, lived in a traditional nursing home after a car accident left her unable to walk. She was one of the first to call and get on the list for this neighbourhood when it was being built, because she said she wanted out of the institutional model of care.
"I really love the fact that we have our own room, but I like it more because it's like your home," she said.
"We get home-cooked meals. We get a really good relationship with the girls, and we actually get to meet with our other elders and talk and have good company."
WATCH | Annette Coker describes how the Green House Project home is different from her previous nursing home: