CHANGING LIVES:
A bold experiment in inter-generational living sees students living with the elderly in a retirement village. And Jenny Brown finds it’s enriching the lives of young and old alike.
friendships blossom when youngsters move into a retirement village
Pat Brown’s eyes are alight with enthusiasm. “Oh, they’re fantastic, they’re our angels,” she says of her new best friends, the four university students who are swapping companionship for free rent at the aged-care facility she calls home.
Aged 79, Pat is chatting animatedly about computers, handicrafts, family history and the university course on dementia prevention she has just completed. This bright-eyed, funny grandmother gets around in a wheelchair but still has “all her marbles”, as she wryly puts it. And she loves sharing life experiences with her 30-year-old neighbour Gabrielle.
Nothing too unusual about that, perhaps – except for the fact that, in a bold new initiative, they both live at Scalabrini Bexley, a care facility in Sydney. That’s where Gabrielle and three other allied health students receive free rent in return for 30 hours of volunteered friendship and conversation each month.
“I tell them my door is always open any time, day or night, and they come to visit,” smiles Pat, who moved to the village three years ago when a painfully ulcerated foot finally made it impossible to stay at home. “I think there should be more dialogue between younger and older generations. If we listen, they can teach us a lot – especially about computers and phones – and we can teach them quite a bit too.”
Softly spoken Gabrielle, a recent occupational therapy graduate, laughs out loud. “To be fair, Pat, I think you know a lot more about phones than I do. You’re on Snapchat and I’m not!”
As they sit talking at the care facility’s Café Siena, decorated with bunting in the Italian colours, their close bond is unmistakable. Pat, a mother of two, was widowed 15 years ago. Gabrielle lost her grandparents before she was 19, but has found a willing substitute in this feisty former hairdresser, pharmacy assistant and taxi driver.
“Pat tried to teach me to sew.
I’m not a very crafty person and I just didn’t have it,” confides the newly minted healthcare professional. “But she gives us the best relationship advice. I know we all have guy problems at times, so it’s nice for all of us to have someone we can go to for that little bit of guidance.
“She’s a special lady. There’s always something new that Pat is looking into or starting to try. She reminds me there’s so much out there to be experienced. I’m inclined to be a bit of a homebody but she makes me more curious about the world.”
Proudly showing off the exquisite, crocheted dream-catcher she just completed, Pat chuckles. “It was the same when I had my hair salon, the staff and customers used to come to me with boy or girlfriend problems. I used to tell them, ‘I’m your [agony aunt] Dorothy Dix,’ but of course they didn’t know who she was or what that meant.”
So what advice does Pat dispense? “Oh, I don’t know,” she muses. “Probably to have trust and patience. Never to say ‘can’t’ because that’s not
a word in my language. And the most important thing: If you don’t put in any effort, you can’t expect to get anything back from relationships, marriage or life. It’s all the same.”
With her ninth decade looming, Pat revels in the company that this new set-up offers – especially the chance to mix with students participating in its ground-breaking Gold Soul Companionship Programme (GSCP).
“If I was living at home I’d be on my own, whereas here I’ve got a community all around me. I still do all the things I would do at home, except housework!” She grins cheekily. “What more could I want?”
As Australia’s Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety exposes horrific cases of premature death, abuse, neglect and negligence, this is a good news story from an embattled sector, also exposed in an incisive ABC Four Corners investigation.
“When I watched that documentary I had tears streaming down my face – to think anyone would treat the aged like that,” says Tracey Gill, 58, who became wellbeing coordinator at the retirement village after a “mid-life crisis” saw her swap sales for a more caring profession. “It affected me 100 per cent, but I also got annoyed because it represented just a small snippet of the industry. That’s not what happens here.”
Tracey says adjusting to life in an aged-care home can be challenging.
“Quite often when people come here it’s not by choice. They might have had a few falls. They’ve had to give up their licence, give up their pets…
All of a sudden they can’t cook for themselves and they’re told what their dinner is going to be. Their world as they have known it changes. So we have to try to ensure they continue to have a say, while keeping them safe and making them feel safe.
“It’s kind of easy if you use common sense and think from the heart. Our residents may be old but they are still valued individuals and it is our job to make them feel that way. We find out what they have done in the past and how they want their lives to be. Then we try to hook them up so they make friends in here.”
The Gold Soul Companionship Programme, inspired by schemes in Europe and the US, is an extension of those efforts to combat the isolation and depression too often experienced by the elderly. And it obviously works.
Walk up to the care facility’s front door and the first thing you notice is music – 1950s classics alternating with Italian ballads – wafting with the smell of coffee from its ground-floor café. Inside there’s a hubbub of happy conversation from family visitors, with a couple of babies crawling at their feet.
Seventy-six-year-old Heinz Brzoson is bopping with a care assistant, although it’s only 11am. “I don’t like hanging out with the old farts like me! I like dancing,” beams Heinz, who is living with Alzheimer’s. “I mix with young people to stay young, and I still can catch a chick. You only live once, so you’ve got to make the best of it.”
At 91, former managing director Neville Tucker can no longer quickstep, but definitely gets a kick out of the company of recent Masters of Physiotherapy graduate, Hannah.
“When the girls came along they started to help me, and I help
“I mix with young people to stay young, and I still can catch a chick.”
them and we do very well, I think,” says the sprightly patriarch, a widower whose clan includes two sons, four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. “Hannah is just down-to-earth and she’s a great organiser who really knows how to look after old people like me.”
To encourage spontaneity, the students aren’t given any particular brief on how they should interact with their elderly neighbours. Activities can include movie-watching, listening to music together, or simply chatting and going for coffee and cake.
“One of the things that makes the programme so sensational is that, as volunteers, the students have the ability to act on the spur of the moment after hours and at weekends when there are usually not so many staff around,” says Sydney University’s senior occupational therapy lecturer Dr Sanetta Du Toit, 49. “Staff don’t have that same freedom because they have chores to complete.”
Gabrielle learned how to make
“the best” pasta sauce in the care facility’s “Nonnas’ Kitchen” where grandmothers share cooking skills honed over many loving decades.
Hannah has improved her golfing skills, enjoying a few rounds of putt putt golf with Neville, who played 18 holes every other day until his legs gave up the struggle. They also “hang out, watch TV together, talk a lot of rubbish,” says the vivacious 25-yearold, describing her stay at Scalabrini as “an overwhelming experience”.
Hannah admits her peers were puzzled to discover she was moving in with 115 senior citizens aged from their early 60s to 103, but she has found it endlessly rewarding.
“After researching programmes like this one overseas, I knew it was something I would get a lot out of,” she explains. “I knew it would be very practical and help with my clinical placements in hospitals. But it’s given me so much more than that. When a resident opens up to you about their life, hearing their story, that’s something you will always have.
Next day they might not be able to remember what they’ve told you, but you can. It’s all those memories…”
Moreover, it’s a chance to break down stereotypes about ageing. “Before I came to live at Scalabrini I was probably a bit afraid of growing old,” Gabrielle confesses. “In general, ageing isn’t something we’re very comfortable with. It’s all that unconscious stuff you carry with you, those human things you are anxious about… I’ve learned that life can always have purpose. It has meaning and value at any age. Getting old is difficult but it’s definitely not the end of everything. I feel I understand that much better now.
“The programme has been a reciprocal thing. We have given our time and companionship, but we have also received from that connection. When you walk into a room here, some people just light up. And learning to sew from Pat – that’s pretty cool too.”
Inevitably, however, the lessons have also included coming to terms with the death of cherished new friends. Gathering for “cake time” to celebrate much-loved lives is one effective coping strategy the students have devised.
“We lost five or six residents within the space of a month,” says Hannah, uncharacteristically sombre. “It really hit home because all of us had worked closely with at least one of them. But it’s part of what we do and we have had to find ways to deal with it. There’s plenty of support from the university and from Scalabrini staff. And the four of us here have become so close through these shared experiences, it’s more than just a regular friendship.”
The same goes for residents, according to Dr Du Toit, who believes the lessons learned from this programme could enrich the lives of young and old right around the world.
“When they talk about the students, [the residents] talk about the friendships they have made. I have observed so many moments of shared joy, of belonging, and that’s a huge thing because the elderly can be severely isolated. It’s difficult to measure the outcomes of a programme like this but wow, there have been really big changes in the residents’ quality of life and wellbeing. It would be wonderful to expand this to other places in future.”
Dr Du Toit believes the project illustrates that residential care facilities are an important part of the wider community. “We need that collective understanding that you can’t raise a child without a village. I think we’ve lost that. These students have had the benefit of the intergenerational connection – that wonderful experience of being in contact with people with incredibly rich and interesting life experience.”