For years, the memory care sector has looked to the Hogeweyk dementia village in the Netherlands as a global standard for person-centered care – and there is still more that operators can learn from it.
A handful of senior care experts and operators visited the Hogeweyk earlier this year, and all of them came away with new ideas for how U.S. senior living providers can better care for those living with dementia.
The Hogeweyk, in Weesp, Netherlands, outside of Amsterdam, opened in 2009 with an open village concept for those in various stages of cognitive decline or dementia diagnosis.
Today, the dementia village has over 180 residents in 27 homes, with homes divided by lifestyle to reflect the ways residents live their lives individually. For example, if a prospective resident lived their life in metropolitan areas, they could be placed in the cosmopolitan-designed unit, or a resident who lived in rural parts of the country could be placed in the traditional type of residence.
“[Residents] are put into a home that reflects that design, and they’re amongst people who share those same kinds of feelings and that same kind of lifestyle, so that they can more easily build connections with each other,” said Adria Thompson, a speech pathologist who participated in the in-person educational visit to the Hogeweyk.
The open-concept community has various amenities commonly found in cities around the world, including a grocery store, theater, hair salon, physical therapy building, and a maintenance office.
Residents of the Hogeweyk are all from the Netherlands, and their care is subsidized by the Dutch federal government to provide dementia care.
Up to seven residents live together in each home at the community. They are grouped by lifestyle assessments, rather than how senior care providers in the U.S. group residents by cognition and level of care.
Of the Hogeweyk’s many features, Thompson noted that staff blended in with residents, with no uniforms or name badges identifying workers within the dementia village—which led to a further sense of the community being its own functioning town, she added.
Dementia Darling Founder Carrie Aalberts said those visiting the Dutch dementia village from the U.S. “didn’t truly understand” the social model employed by the Hogeweyk compared to a medical model for dementia care – until stepping foot on the community grounds.
“It wasn’t a facade,” Aalberts said. “Everything was real. The grocery store was real. We were at a restaurant. It was so overwhelmingly amazing to see how it can be done. You can live in this world, and it gives me a lot of hope.”
Bella Groves co-founder James Lee said he came away with the notion that while senior living operators in the U.S. do share information and best practices in dementia care, he urged operators to go further.
“The Hogeweyk wants to help other organizations create their own versions of innovation. That really struck me—that they weren’t trying to copy and paste the Hogeweyk into other places,” he said. “They want to advise and help people with whatever your vision of a better world is for people living with dementia and their caregivers.”
In visiting the Hogeweyk, Thompson said she was “disappointed” in thinking so often of the risks involved with open-concept dementia villages, rather than realizing the independence and lifestyle enrichment created for residents at the Hogeweyk.
“That’s changing my rehabilitation speech therapy mindset of mitigating risk,” Thompson added. “All of this structure makes me think that maybe life is a little bit more than that.”
In today’s senior living environment in the U.S., Lee said providers view quality of life on one axis and then age on another axis, with the general premise being that as one ages, quality of life degrades over time in a linear fashion.
“So instead of this gradual, linear decline in quality of life over age, keep the quality of life as high as possible for as long as possible, and then you might have that steep decline there at the very end of life,” Lee said of Hogeweyk’s model. “They’re saying, whatever that lifespan is, keep it as high as long as you possibly can, and then give them dignity in those final days.”
By instilling a sense of independence and freedom, Aalberts said residents of the Hogeweyk seemed happy with their quality of life, noting the unique experience of households shopping daily for groceries to be cooked for that night’s dinner as one example of the Hogeweyk’s lifestyle-driven approach to dementia care.
“It really is that freedom aspect,” Aalberts said. “There wasn’t someone saying, don’t go there or don’t go by that door—you didn’t feel confined, and you’re just getting that vibe of life being lived around you.”
With the Hogeweyk’s expansive campus, leaders and staff have created “natural ways” for residents to engage socially as they had done for their entire lives prior to moving in—which created a sense of ease and reduced stress among residents, Thompson said.
“Part of the fabric of my life is going to the grocery store, making a meal, going to a coffee shop and visiting with my friends, and because of how [The Hogeweyk] is structured, the byproduct of that is natural purpose and joy,” Thompson said.
In visiting the community, Lee said a “huge takeaway” for him was the community’s use of grouping people around life interests, with the Hogeweyk offering over 30 different types of social clubs residents could participate in.
“It’s going to change the way that we approach certain things that we do,” Lee said. “This is a lot of stuff that will change how we approach, I think, the network of people at Bella Groves serving its own community.”
The post What Memory Care Leaders Learned After Visiting the Famed Dutch Hogeweyk Community appeared first on Senior Housing News.
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