Care in Healthcare by Franziska Krause & Joachim Boldt

Author:Franziska Krause & Joachim Boldt
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Discussion

When the village was inaugurated in March 2014, the project’s chief administrator did not mince her words: “Here we see how care work works in the 21st century. This is a great project for Hamelin, it is a great day for the city”. And the chairwoman of the Tönebön foundation added, with reference to the village’s critics, that the residents should not be seen as having been “deported” or “marginalised”, as they would continue to partake in Hamelin’s social life. “We want to make their daily routine as normal as possible”, she emphasised, maintaining that what and where they eat is up to the residents themselves. “The refrigerator door is open to anyone, anytime. If someone wants to make coffee in the morning or eat a yoghurt, they can”. The village is a primary example of “full in-patient care where the residents remain self-determined”, which is “very labour intensive” (Keller 2014).17

The home had two advantages when it opened its doors. First, it could model its design and principles on the successfully implemented Dutch care home, learning from the Dutch experience and continuing the tried and tested approach. This circumstance proved vital in convincing investors and critics. Second, the model’s novelty and progressive methods invited not only many families and individuals from around Germany to consider it as a potential care home, but equally grabbed the interest of many carers.18 A few weeks after the inaugural celebrations, when I first visited, the village was still in turmoil. Undertaking a new project and implementing new processes is always a bumpy road, and launching the first German dementia village proved no exception. When I began my fieldwork, the care staff comprised 18 team members (15 women, 3 men), and the residents occupied two of the four houses, with more residents moving in every day. Management did not know how much staff was needed, who exactly would move in, or how things would work in detail. The residents had been uprooted from their former lives, the new workers needed to acclimatise to their new environment, and all of this occurred in the presence of much uncertainty. In between the intricate rules and philosophies laid out in the village’s blueprint, and the frantic everyday care routine, there often was not much space for contemplation. Before we thus venture deeper into the everyday care routine, it is worthwhile to bring more attention to the idea of a dementia village.

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