‘Alzheimer’s village’ frees patients to lead a normal life
WORK began yesterday on France’s first “Alzheimer’s village” where patients will be given free rein without medication in a purpose-built medieval-style citadel designed to increase their freedom and reduce anxiety.
Residents of the village in Dax, south-western France, will be able to shop in a small supermarket, go to the hairdressers, local brasserie, library, gym and a little farm.
They will live in small shared houses designed to reflect their personal tastes and in four districts between forests and the seashore. While it may sound similar to a typical residential complex, the inhabitants are all men and women suffering from Alzheimer’s, the commonest cause of dementia.
Allowing them to live in an almost normal village helps “maintain (patients’) participation in social life”, said Prof Jean-françois Dartigues, a neurologist at the Pellegrin university hospital in Bordeaux. “The brain is the organ of human relations.”
The village is the idea of the late Henri Emmanuelli, a former socialist minister and local MP who launched the project after reading about a Dutch gated model village in Weesp, part of the Amsterdam metropolitan area, seen as a pioneering care facility for elderly people with dementia.
Residents are confined to the village for their own safety but are allowed to move around freely inside and are watched over by plain-clothed medical staff. Some have described the set-up as reminiscent of The Truman Show, the film in which Jim Carrey lives in a fake town that unbeknown to him is a vast reality TV set.
Its proponents say that compared with traditional nursing homes, residents are more active, require less medication, and are happier.
The French model will seek scientific proof that this is the case. Young researchers will “cohabit” with the 120 residents who have Alzheimer’s, along with 100 live-in carers and 120 volunteers who will stage activities.
The researchers will conduct a comparative study with traditional nursing homes and examine “the impact of new therapeutic approaches on patients, carers and medical staff ”, Prof Dartigues told Le Monde.
Rather than opting for modern architecture, the village has been designed to look like the traditional historic centre of a medieval “bastide”, or fortified town, commonplace in the Landes area, so that patients do not feel disorientated.
Nathalie Grégoire, its architect, said that secure walkways within a vast green area and “a lack of enclosures” maintained a semblance of social life while making it easy to care for the residents. “We hope that the patients will be less constrained and anxious, happier,” she said.
Françoise Diris, president of the France Alzheimer Landes association, added: “The same goes for the medical staff. Families will also be more relaxed, and feel less guilty.”
If the experimental village proves a success, it could lead to many more in France – home to around a million Alzheimer’s sufferers and with as many as 150,000 new cases every year.