Imagine you are 50 years old. You and your spouse have a nice home and a cabin you visit on the weekends. Your children are grown and are out living their lives. Pretty great, huh?
Now imagine you are 80 years old. Your spouse has died, and you are living in your home all by yourself. You slipped in the kitchen a month ago and broke your hip. Sitting in a wheelchair not being able to navigate your house, your children found it best for you to live in a nursing home. You are taken from your home of 50+ years and forced to share a small bedroom with a person you don't know. A staff member wakes you up and puts you to bed every day at the same time. Your freedom is the first thing to go. Next stop dignity. Sporting a Depends you are checked every few hours to see if you have gone to the bathroom. If you have, great! Now you get to be changed like a baby.
Does that sound like a way you would like your parents to spend their final years, let alone yours?
Yes there are other alternatives to nursing homes, but not everyone can afford those solutions. My girlfriend works at an assisted living home. The going rate there is $9,000 a month. That boils down to over $100,000 a year. It is a really nice place, recently remodeled. Hell, I would even like to live there! Right now there is only one resident. Staff to resident ratio is 1:1, but this is not your average nursing home. Some nursing home ratios are 1:15, or worse. The staff isn’t going to be able to stay on top of every resident at all times so there is naturally going to be some neglect every now and then.
There are the obvious ways that design could better improve this situation for the elderly by giving them their own rooms, giving them more privacy and thus allowing them to become more comfortable. But where else can design step in to help, or are we once again enslaved to the greenbacks?
