Health
| The Eden alternative |
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Page 2 of 2 Pets and plantsMany British care homes ban pets, but those attuned to the Eden approach positively encourage them. Animals and plants offer residents a chance to care for something. Pets provide companionship and promote spontaneous interchange. Of course, all this activity can involve risk. If you allow residents to peel the carrots, they could injure themselves. If you allow cats to roam around, they could bring in an infection. If you hold a fireworks party, a rocket might hit a resident. But risk needs to be put in proportion and reduced as far as is reasonable – not used as an excuse for inaction. June Burgess, an English Registered Nurse, who encountered Eden in Australia and is now co-ordinating its promotion in Britain and Ireland, told me: “When people are living in a communal environment there are certain rules and regulations that have to be applied. But these should not restrict residents’ lives unnecessarily. An Eden home is a place where life continues, and human growth inevitably involves some risk.” Residents can prepare food without using dangerous equipment – a scraper in place of a knife, for example – while animals have a care plan to ensure that they are healthy and well looked after. Many care home residents have some degree of dementia. This entails a progressive, irreversible decline in their mental faculties, but not in their emotions or their ability to feel the full spectrum of pleasure and pain. In many British care homes, people with dementia are effectively written off as if they were no longer real people at all. An Eden home sees the person first, then their dementia, and seeks to enable those affected to make the most of their lives. Christa Monkhouse explains: “We have one elderly man who is a vet. Now, he cannot retain any new information: he asks every five minutes where he is. But if you take him outside, he says: ‘This is where they used to have cows, there was a pond here’. He can talk for hours – but only if he is prompted by buildings or names or people.” Eden residents decide on outings, activities and equipment, which newspapers should be taken, the menu and so on. Staff, not least the chef, are expected to make time for consultation with residents, and to make this process as enjoyable as possible. There is also consultation on the many details of each individual’s daily life, not just the time at which they get up in the morning but also the extent to which they get dressed, for example. The Eden philosophy holds that the practice of getting all residents fully dressed (usually at top speed) before breakfast is as depersonalising as the old hospital practice of keeping everybody in their nightclothes all day. Life assistants can use the time saved by leaving some people in casual clothes to provide extra kinds of help for others, such as putting curlers in their hair. Of course, there are many British care homes that are vibrant places in which to live. Yet such homes tend to depend on the imagination or energy of a single individual. If they leave, the ethos of the home may change. But once the Eden philosophy is embedded in the culture and the structure of an institution – and everyone from the laundry assistant to the administrator has been appropriately trained – good practice should be sufficiently entrenched to survive changes of management. For many years the debate about care homes in Britain has confined itself to just two subjects: abuse and paying for care. Quality of life has been a glaring omission. People choosing a care home often quiz the manager about the meals or fire escapes. It is time we all realised, like Dr Thomas, that psychological wellbeing matters more. The insights implicit in the Eden philosophy, if adopted by Britain’s care industry, could help to make our often impersonal care establishments into real homes. Further informationVisit the Eden Alternative’s website at: www.eden-alternative.co.uk |
