A Dutch company is building its second ‘dementia village’

(This post originally appeared on The Washington Post)

Is a community specifically designed for the more than 50 million people worldwide suffering from dementia a good or bad thing? One Dutch company thinks it’s a good thing — and it is now in the process of launching its second village, this time in Kent, England.

The village will have 4,000 homes and its own shops and cafes, including a supermarket and a cinema. Like any attractive village, there will be bars, restaurants, activities, medical care, squares and parks. All of the residents will be free to spend their money, engage in activities and even drink a beer whenever they want (within reason of course). It sounds nice, particularly because these residents will have one thing in common: they all suffer from some form of dementia.

“A lot of nursing homes are based on a medical approach,” Frank van Dillen, co-founder of Dementia Village Advisors, the company behind the concept, said in a report from The Guardian. “We try to deinstitutionalize that approach because people want to live as normally as possible.”

The site in England is being modeled off another similar site developed by van Dillen’s company and located near Amsterdam. Called Hogeweyk, the village was opened in 2009 and employs specially trained staff who are taught not to “treat” patients, but to care for them. All of this is not cheap — a typical resident pays about €6,000 (about $7,700) per month to live at Hogeweyk.

A representative from the Alzheimer’s Society, Stacy Cannon, thinks that while the idea of a “dementia village” could be beneficial to some, it may not apply to everyone. “A lot of the principles they’re talking about are ones that can be applied to any community by people behaving in a different way, adapting their surroundings and looking at the policies of their organizations,” she said in the Guardian article. Improved signage and a general increase in patience for those that take longer to do things would go a long way, regardless of the community, Cannon believes.

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