Dementia village for old school site
The HW Richardson Group and Calvary Hospital Southland are working on a proposal to build a multi-million-dollar dementia care facility on the former Hawthorndale School site in Invercargill.
HW Richardson Group director Scott O’Donnell said he decided to get involved in the project because his 82-year-old father Keith had dementia prior to his death more than two years ago.
‘‘As my father’s care needed to be changed, he needed to keep changing rest homes,’’ O’Donnell said.
‘‘The worst thing for dementia patients is to keep changing their environments.’’
The proposed dementia village at the former school site on Tay St would enable dementia patients to stay in the facility as their needs changed, he said.
The HW Richardson Group purchased the former Hawthorndale School site – a school which O’Donnell attended as a boy – off the Seventh Day Adventist Church in 2017, he said.
The proposed dementia village was a joint venture with Calvary Hospital.
Calvary Hospital would run the dementia facility, he said.
‘‘Ideally they would own it over time, we don’t need to own it long term.
‘‘We just want to get it built and get it used.’’
HW Richardson Group had put a ‘‘bunch of money’’ up front to try and kick the project off, he said.
‘‘And we are looking to get community support to carry on and get it done.’’
The business case was more or less done.
‘‘Now it’s a matter of finding the funding to go and make it work.’’
The estimated cost of the dementia care facility would be in the range of $25 million to $30m, he said.
A Calvary Hospital spokesperson confirmed last week that the 2.7-hectare Tay St site was being looked at for the dementia development.
However, it is understood a final decision may be several weeks away.
Last year, the hospital was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Community Trust of Southland to investigate the feasibility of establishing a dementia care facility for Southland.
In January this year, Calvary Hospital said the project vision was for a ‘‘dementia village’’ of 12 homes housing seven residents each, and 10 additional independent living units, based on the De Hogeweyk model in Amsterdam.
The De Hogeweyk village gave residents the opportunity to participate in normal life with streets, gardens, a shop, cafe, and playgrounds.
O’Donnell confirmed the De Hogeweyk model was still the proposal.
A similar New Zealand concept, Whare Aroha CARE, is already open in Rotorua.
Calvary Hospital, in January, said the concept was about living life as normal, rather than in an institutional environment which dementia patients could find hostile.
The proposal at that time for for each house to be different, with a familiar theme specific to the particular residents.
The aim was to provide an environment that helped keep the dementia residents calm and offered them a superior quality of life.
The dementia population was expected to triple by 2050 so the hospital was ‘‘looking for a new approach to care for dementia sufferers and to give them a sense of freedom, belonging, and value in our community’’.
Calvary Hospital, in Invercargill, had 42 hospital beds and 30 residential places, and did not currently offer specialist dementia care, a hospital spokeswoman said earlier this year.