Artist watercolour illustration of The Village, a community specifically designed for up to 78 people with dementia. It’s the first of its kind in Canada.PNG Merlin Archive / PNG

Elder Care Village

“The Village” is going to be comprised of 6 single storey cottage style homes and a community centre, a barn to house chickens, and other animals. The Village will be home to 78 dementia challenged people, and other degenerative brain diseases associated with aging. The care will be provided by 72 specially trained staff ensuring great attention is given to each and everyone.

There is also another one planed by Providence Health Care on the St.Vincent’s Hospital site at Heather Street and West 33rd. This will take several years to open it’s doors to patience.

The work that is going on in facilities like this is giving care to these people suffering from these diseases is ground breaking. I heard a story about how at one of these facilities that they were watching the patience wandering away from the care facility and it was traumatizing getting them back to treatment. So they put a “fake” bus stop in front of the home were the patience would sit for a few hours until the bus did not come and then under there own control would wander back to the facility and their rooms with no stress to them.

It is little things like this that can be measured and evaluated to make life better for the patience. The caretakers and nurses can then find ways to help bring life back to these people suffering. With no locks on doors, no steps to climb life will be as stress free as possible. We can only hope that these places can find simple ways to bring back dignity to sufferers and the prolong systems can be slowed down with simple measures.

The set back with Pfizer abandoning research to discover new drugs to fight Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease hope seems further away. Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund with partners like GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly and government groups that seeks to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s still brings hope.

At the turn of the century farming industry accounted for 80% of all employment. When the talk was that automation would replace most of these jobs people worried about employment. With automation coming with a vengeance to our workforce will this mean the shift we be to care facilities and we will have more time and resources for one another? We can only hope so!

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