Estate Living Magazine Retirement Living - Issue 40 April 2019 | Page 44

d e v e l O p m e n t
&
I N V E S T M E N T
SQUARING
IS CARING
Boredom is a killer. Ask any preschool teacher or any retirement
facility manager and they’ll tell you that the worst thing they can
do is let their charges get bored. And that goes for dementia
patients, too – possibly even more so.
Quadrant Gardens
people control of their environment, and affording good links with the
community have a positive association with wellbeing.
Care vs control
McMorran explains that the physical structures and spaces in
which care takes place largely dictate how much interaction is
possible between carers and residents, and between residents.
Most care facilities, he continues, are based on a long-standing
default design of lots of rooms leading off long corridors –
structures he describes as ‘essentially the most basic people
storage; effectively a giant human filing system’. On the surface,
this design might seem efficient but, McMorran explains, it is
stressful for all parties:
To care and protect
Obviously, the most urgent and essential aspect of care is to
ensure the safety of the people being cared for. But an emphasis
on safety and security can ‘coerce those people living “in care”
into becoming passive participants in daily routines that are out
of their direct control,’ as William G McMorran of Architectonicus
says in his 2017 study of the relationship of architecture to the care
of dementia patients: The architecture of care – a new approach.
This resonates with the main argument in the 2006 book 1* by
Judith Torrington (School of Architecture, University of Sheffield),
who says:
Quality of life was shown to be poorer in buildings that prioritise
safety and health [over wellbeing]. Buildings that positively
support activity by providing good assistive devices, giving
1 * What has architecture got to do with dementia care?:
Explorations of the relationship between quality of life and building
design in two EQUAL projects.
Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2006, emeraldinsight.com
The opportunity for independent expression of personhood is
substantially limited and a culture of dependence is consequently
the basis of most care provision. Care staff become so fully
preoccupied by the pressures this dependence imposes that they
are unable to create for themselves the empathetic, shared one-
to-one care that would increase wellbeing in those they care for
and reduce the frustration and exhaustion generally experienced
by carers.
Continuing with the obvious similarities (despite the equally
obvious immense differences) in caring for children and caring
for people with dementia, everyone acknowledges that nurturing
potential, allowing for creativity and meaningful social interaction,
is an essential part of caring for children, and recent research
shows that older people – including and especially people with
dementia – need that too. Old age, and even dotage, should be
a time of consolidation, a time to creatively bring one’s life to a
close, but the generally held, knee-jerk, default assumption is
that – especially for people with dementia – it’s just an interim
arrangement of killing time until you die.