How retro-styling homes can help elderly people with dementia feel more comfortable
Retro-decorating can help people with dementia to stay at home for longer by placing familiar items from their past in their home to reduce anxiety and to trigger memories. Jeremy Dunning reports
With about 750,000 dementia sufferers in the UK, costing the UK £20bn a year and numbers set to grow to 1.7 million over the next 40 years, commissioners and providers are looking for cost-effective models of providing dementia care.
Adult social care manager Joelle Bevington, from Surrey Council, has seen good results from retro-decorating since the council began implementing the model as a facet of personalisation. "We are seeing that people do feel less anxious and more able to do things and getting things for themselves from their kitchen because they know where things are," she says. "People are more self-sufficient."
The council has been using the technique in people's homes, day centres and care homes for adults with dementia.
The intention is to allow people to stay at home for longer and out of hospital by providing low-level support, such as old-style fixtures and fittings or pictures of favourite movie stars, that people with dementia will remember from their childhood. This is because long-term memories, unlike short-term memories, are normally retained and can be stimulated. This will be mixed with surroundings that are airy and light.
People can also be helped by finding ways for them to re-engage in activities they enjoyed in the past. For example, by providing someone who likes cooking with basic utensils to do a bit of baking with the support care workers may lead to a reduction in anxiety levels with the consequent effect of reducing cost to the health and social care system by ensuring they do not require hospital treatment.
According to the Centre for Housing Policy and York Health Economics Consortium, at the University of York, postponing entry into residential care by a year saves on average £28,000 a person, based on the average cost of providing residential care (Kent University personal social services research unit sets this figure at £26,000).
"For people with dementia, quite often they have recognition and you can stimulate memory from the past and usually you have to go back quite far. The short-term memory is lost first so it's about taking people back to a place where they feel familiar. Where people recognise their surroundings a bit more it lessens anxiety and it means people feel more able and capable so in a kitchen people can recognise if you use an old-style kitchen," says Bevington.
The Riverside Home Improvement Agency, of Liverpool, is also piloting this "dementia-proofing" approach.
Paul Booth, regeneration manager at The Riverside Group said: "We believe that the holistic nature of a home intervention can help to reduce usage of other public services. We can provide interventions that allow an individual with dementia to live an independent life which can help reduce dependence upon anti-psychotic drug therapies. These benefits continue year-on-year after implementation, without significant further investment."
Riverside team leader Brian McGorry estimates that 100 clients could benefit although he acknowledges that the pilot is in its infancy. However, work with one woman, who is in the early stages of dementia, has indicated the possibilities. Here the team put in an old sewing machine and a 1960-style Bush transistor radio which brought back many memories of preparing family meals accompanied by the BBC's Light Programme as well as old-style rugs and mats. All of this costs the agency £65.
The technique is time-intensive for staff because it requires conversations with family members and the sufferer in order to put together a life-story of the person and then to work out how to implement that in terms of therapy.
"There's a lot of involvement from us because we've got to see the client a lot and see if they've kept the item or whether they've taken it down," says McGorry.
