If You Build a Nursing Home That Looks Like a Hospital

If you build a nursing home that looks like a hospital, the people who live there will behave like patients. They will be sick, they will be unhappy, they will defer to those giving them care.

If you build a nursing home that looks like a community of small houses, the people who live there will behave like functioning independent people. They will be active, they will take more control of themselves, they will ask for the care that they need.

Behaviours truly do emerge from the systems you set up. If you want to create a nursing home that is respectful and promotes activity and vibrant living, if you want to create an environment where multi-skilled staff do whatever is necessary to help those who live there, then the design of your building is important, the design of your policies is important, the priorities of your value systems are important.

The Village Model at Sherbrooke Community Centre in Saskatoon is living proof of this. Rather than an institutional look and feel, the resident live in a small community of joined houses, complete with indoor streets. Staff provide the medical services along with all the diverse, normal services that anyone would provide for their own homes. Residents are more independent and in control of their own care. As CEO Suellen Beatty says, "We did not realize how much simpler the environment would make our work."

It is harder to do compassionate, respectful, client-centered care in an institutional hospital setting. The systems that your people work within are important, and can make the path forward easy and natural, or bumpy and difficult.