As Australia’s population continues to age, the federal government is encouraging more innovative forms of care. Some providers have answered that call by looking towards the Netherlands and a model than aims to humanise care for people living with dementia.
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00:00Henry Field is one of the first residents to move into this village for people living with dementia.
00:08Here, the 82-year-old artist is free to move through open doors, shop at the corner store and engage in a range of everyday activities.
00:17Well I love it. First I thought I might not because I'm not into institutions where you have to follow the rules constantly.
00:27I could not imagine him in a nursing home, even a mayor's home. For him, little room, no activities constantly.
00:36I think he would have really struggled and I think the worst of the dementia mental symptoms would have come on.
00:43His wife Liz says that before moving in, Henry was forgetting to eat, losing weight and feeling isolated.
00:50Now I look at him and think that he is so engaged with the activities that are available and wanting to encourage the others.
00:59This village is one of three in Australia, based on the De Hogevecht model in the Netherlands.
01:04The normalcy makes it quite exceptional.
01:09First established in 2009, it provides choice in daily routines and aims to give residents greater autonomy compared with traditional institutions.
01:19You lose a lot of who you are as a human being, so normalising, getting away from the institutional settings and beliefs, but also bringing back humanity again.
01:33Projects like this one are being backed by the federal government. It's invested almost $50 million in scaling up innovative care models nationally.
01:42We have a lot of evidence that says that people living with dementia in these models usually have better outcomes.
01:49The other side of the coin then is that there requires a lot of training and support, both at the workforce level but also at the executive level.
01:58Training that's helping the likes of Henry make the most of their sunset years.