Growing older isn’t for the weak, my grandpa used to say. But for all of life’s amazing moments, there will come a time where we will need others to help us get by.

That’s never more necessary than for people who are struggling with dementia. And while care for those people often is limited, one facility in Amsterdam is working to change the perception of what your life will be like once you are diagnosed with an impairment like that.

And they are doing it by showing that yes, it does take a village to help one another.

For the people living in Hogeweyk, a small village, life seems very idyllic. Typical of what you might expect to find. Residents go grocery shopping, visit friends, play bingo at a local building, as well go to theater productions and visit hair stylists. The only thing is – Hogeweyk is a care facility for people suffering from dementia.

Residents of Hogeweyk share a bike as the roam around the village. Photo by Hogeweyk.

The nursing home village is run by Dementia Villages Associates. The group wants to change how care for the elderly is handled. Inside the village, there are 23 homes with up to seven people living there, along with a caregiver. The caregiver is tasked with preparing meals and helping the residents get to and from social events, go shopping or food, or anything else that might be needed.

The organizers of the village call it “inclusive; truly person-centered with high-quality care and treatment; revolutionary; groundbreaking; disruptive; and sustainable.”

On its website, they said:

Many Alzheimer’s experts have, however, valued The Hogeweyk for what it really is: a familiar and safe environment in which people with dementia live while retaining their own identity and autonomy as much as possible.”

All the staff, the organization wrote, that works at The Hogeweyk “uses their professional skills to actually support the residents and are, therefore, certainly not actors.” 

Facility manager and co-founder Eloy van Hal told Business Insider that it helps those with mild to severe dementia suffer a little bit less in their later years. He believes that this sort of design helps to uphold people’s sense of independence. 

A resident of Hogeweyk grocery shops in the village supermarket. Photo by Hogeweyk.

Jannette Spiering, another founder of the Hogeweyk site, said the original concept took years to develop.

“We thought we could do better by focusing also on social care in addition to medical care.”

The idea of a ‘neighborhood’ meant finding ways to increase the ability of the people who live there to socialize with others. 

“Within that neighborhood people are free to go wherever they want, and we want to integrate society with our neighborhood as much as possible,” Spiering said.

For that, she said, they bring in residents that live in neighboring towns to visit Hogeweyk.

We try to lift the stigma of dementia, because it’s highly stigmatized,” Spiering said.

“But I think it’s the other way around – society doesn’t know how to have contact with people with dementia, because sometimes people ask for a different approach and then you have to have some knowledge of what dementia means.”

Spiering said that having a village like this allows people who suffer from dementia to have a better quality of life than they might have otherwise.

“If you lock them up in a facility which looks like a hospital, then people will start to behave like they are in a hospital,” she said. “They become anxious, and they want to get out because they do not recognise that environment, and they constantly think that they are ill.”

But this, she said, changes everything. 

“That helps in having a good life and having a meaningful one,” she said. “So normalization is the key word, I think.”

For a look at the village and the ideas behind it, watch the video below. Leave a comment and let us know if you think there should be more villages like that, especially here in the U.S.

Sources: Upworthy | BBC | Business Insider