Designing care homes with dementia in mind is complex yet essential for the wellbeing of the 80% of residents who live with the condition and can prevent avoidable accidents and injuries.
In its new white paper, Designing for Dementia, Blueleaf, the care home provider, outlines the latest thinking and challenges of ensuring a home is safe and inclusive for people whose memory, eyesight and cognitive function are fading and help them remain as socially active and independent as possible.
By 2040, 1.6 million people in the UK will be living with dementia. As the condition advances, a person’s brain has more difficulty processing and understanding what they are seeing. Changes in perception, along with fading memory and eyesight, make residents feel anxious or agitated, and increase the likelihood of accidents and falls. Using inclusive design principles, however, can reduce their anxiety and enable people to live a more dignified life.
The correct choice of colours, patterns, fabrics and furnishings can reduce anxiety by avoiding swirls which can be interpreted as slithering snakes, or shiny floors being seen as too wet and slippery to walk on. Carefully choosing furnishings and decorative schemes help residents see more clearly how to find their way around a home.
The report explains the importance of clear signposting, using tonally contrasting colours to distinguish critical surfaces such as floors from walls, or the edge of steps, or handrails on doors. It also explains how using the correct flooring material can help residents walk safely, and using neutral colour schemes to create a homely rather than an institutional style which helps reduce their anxiety and confusion.
Elizabeth Butcher, Head of Marketing at Blueleaf, believes the white paper will help care homes reconsider their approach to design: “Designing for Dementia isn’t easy, but is increasingly essential with the ageing population and the growing number of care home residents living with the condition. With all the best practice guidelines to follow and much of it governed by commercial health and safety standards, designing or refurbishing a care home can seem complicated,” says Liz, “but there is plenty of good advice out there. Our aim in producing this white paper is to help care homes providers understand how to become even more dementia friendly so that more residents can live a calm and peaceful life.”
The price of using appropriate design principles is a good investment: “Refurbishing homes to meet these standards need not cost the earth,” Liz continues, “but it will spare residents from avoidable accidents, and ultimately retain their dignity and independence.”
The white paper Designing for Dementia is available on the Blueleaf website: https://www.blueleafcare.com/landing-page/designing-for-dementia
