The Green House Project
Posted by Patti on April 26th, 2005 / Print This Post
From the NY Times, something to consider:
TUPELO, Miss. - At the Cedars Health Center, a traditional 140-bed nursing home here, meals are delivered on trays, hospital style. Hallways floored with linoleum extend in every direction. The smell is sterile and sour.Cynthia Dunn, 82, lived there until she moved into a Green House, two streets away. Ms. Dunn’s new home, a carpeted ranch-style house that she shares with nine others, has a communal dining table and an open kitchen. Emergency call lights are disguised by decorative stencils. The two staff members who care for the residents answer beepers, not bells, to reduce the institutional cacophony. On a recent visit, the smell at the door was of corn bread baking.
Ms. Dunn, who has her own bedroom and bath at the Green House, pulled herself up in her wheelchair without invitation and expressed her opinion on where she lived. “This is the most wonderful place I’ve been to yet,” she said. “The people, the food, everything.”
The Green House Project, comprising 10 new suburban houses here, is an experiment in reinventing the nursing home. Its creators hope it will herald a new age for old age, although its advantages to residents are yet unproved in health care studies.
Green Houses are part of a broadening movement to humanize care for elderly people with smaller, more domestic settings and a closer sense of community among residents and staff members. And they are an effort to address the fears of being institutionalized, among them anxieties about the loss of independence and the potential for abuse.