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szdaily -> Kaleidoscope -> 
Work on ‘Alzheimer’s village’ begins
    2018-06-07  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

FRANCE is building a specially designed village to allow people with Alzheimer’s disease to continue living normal lives outside of a nursing home.

The new village will be built in Dax, in the southwest of France near the border with Spain.

People living in the village — who will be called residents instead of patients – will have their own supermarket, health center, hairdresser, brasserie, gym, library and a farm.

The village will be enclosed for the residents’ safety but they will be able to wander around freely within its walls.

Nursing staff will be dressed in plain clothes and people will be given less medication, while volunteers will help run the village.

Its developers hope the 29-million-euro (US$33.99 million) village will allow people with Alzheimer’s and dementia to lead more active and happy lives.

Residents of the new village will live in shared houses and everybody living there will have Alzheimer’s disease, which causes the majority of cases of dementia.

Alzheimer’s can cause people to become forgetful and have difficulty communicating and concentrating.

The village will be built to look like the center of a medieval walled town so it fits in with the region, The Telegraph reports, and it will be designed to help people with walking, memory and sense of direction.

It will be large enough to hold 120 residents plus 100 care staff and 120 volunteers.

Francoise Diris, president of the France Alzheimer Landes Association, said, “We hope that the patients will be less constrained and anxious. The same goes for the medical staff.

“Families will also be more relaxed, and feel less guilty.”

The project is based on a similar village in Weesp in the Netherlands, and was begun by the late Henri Emmanuelli, a former local MP and French socialist.

In the Dutch model residents cannot leave the village but are free to wander around inside while being watched by staff in plain clothes. The staff say they care for residents rather than treating patients.

Scientific researchers will live among the residents in France to compare life in the village to life in a traditional nursing home, to study whether it is better for the patients.

Experts say the village could help people maintain healthy social lives which may be difficult when living in a normal town or a nursing home.

The project has been compared to the movie “The Truman Show,” in which a character played by comedian Jim Carrey lives in a town which he does not know is make-believe, and he is unwittingly the star of a reality TV show.

The government will fund the majority of the village, which will cost 29 million euros to build, 7 million euros to run and will charge residents 66 euros per day — reportedly about the same as a traditional nursing home.

The village was designed in detail by Danish firm NORD Architects.

It is intended that having dementia sufferers living together amongst carers will reduce their anxiety.

Day-to-day activities can become difficult for those with the degenerative brain disease because they may struggle to communicate or to organize themselves, and can forget where they are or what they are doing.

Symptoms of the condition tend to get worse over time and can make people physically disabled and eventually kill them as the brain fails.

Dementia is incurable and treatment is based on managing the symptoms.

(SD-Agencies)

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