industry & policy
Dignity and choice
A personalised room in a Humanitas home. Photo: Group Homes Australia
Lessons in aged care from the Netherlands.
Tamar Krebs interviewed by Dallas Bastian
14 agedcareinsite. com. au
An unapologetic approach to care and a focus on resident choice.
These are two of the tenets of a Dutch approach to aged care that struck founder and chief executive of Group Homes Australia, Tamar Krebs, during her recent trip to the Netherlands.
Krebs flew there to meet with Dr Hans Becker, chairman of Humanitas, a provider that champions a model of care that focuses on self-determination and resident empowerment.
“ In the Netherlands, they try to keep people in their local communities, no matter what their level of frailties,” Krebs said.“ However, when they get dementia, the idea is to introduce them into social models in the community.”
Similarly, Group Homes Australia’ s facilities are situated in local communities, allowing residents to stay in familiar environments. However, according to Krebs, there is always room for improvement.
“ We would like to personalise the homes even more,” she explained.“ Humanitas introduced the concept of creating a space that brings [ people ] back to their long-term memories, by using meaningful artefacts from their generation or period around the home. These artefacts help them to adjust.”
Aged Care Insite sat down with Krebs to find out more about Humanitas’ approach to care and the lessons she learnt in the Netherlands that can be applied in Australia.
ACI: First of all, what were you hoping to get out of the trip? TK: I think it’ s important as industry leaders to constantly be open to see other models of care and the way other countries and cultures are delivering dementia care. The Dutch are world renowned for their innovation and approach to dignity and choice in aged care. This whole philosophy has been going on there for about 30 years. They have quite innovative models, from the De Hogeweyk model, which is the dementia village that lots of people have heard of, and CNN has done a big blurb on, to Humanitas and Dr Hans Becker. He’ s been very innovative with the whole‘ yes’ culture and talking about all of his approach to aged care.
Then there is the whole group homes model, which is what we, Group Homes Australia, do here in Australia. We’ re the first to do that here, but I really wanted to see what they were doing in the Netherlands. They’ ve been doing it for the last 30 years, so I wanted to see how the model had evolved.
Why did you decide to seek out Humanitas in particular out of all of the models of care in the Netherlands? I’ ve been following Dr Hans Becker for quite a while. He came out to Australia probably in 2009 and I went to a talk of his, and what struck me is he said then, and he also said it when we came to Humanitas, that“ in the Netherlands, it’ s not about cure and care.” He said:“ The focus unfortunately has become about curing aged people.”
He said:“ Age is not a disease, but we have to create interesting things for people to talk about when they’ re ageing. Otherwise, it’ s all about the aches and pains that they have.”
And so he does some really‘ out there’, crazy things like bringing elephants into the retirement village, camels into the retirement village, having wheelchair races. Things that essentially you’ d think something really crazy is going on, but it creates conversation. It makes people laugh. It makes people forget about their aches and pains and especially, as people are becoming more vulnerable, his philosophy is about giving them more things to talk about and not focus on their vulnerabilities and the loss of what age brings. And so his whole approach is the‘ yes’ approach.
He says:“ We always start in the company with