Have you ever visited someone in a big retirement community and feel like they are just waiting to die? Seems tragic right?
Don’t want the same feeling when its time for mom & dad to move to a similar facility. If the experience of seeing someone in a dire predicament made you vow that you will never place your parents in this same type of group facility let alone face the specter of yourself someday ending up in one, the question is if not there, where?
The answer is small residential senior living homes. Here is why they are the better choice compared to the larger communities out there.
What is a Small Residential Senior Living Home?
Most people are aware of the typical nursing home setup and are also quite knowledgeable about its inherent pitfalls. Therefore, some facilities are reinventing the model by taking on a different approach: small residential senior living.
Scott Hemenway and his homes, The Geneva Suites, is one of the pioneers of the exceptional senior living homes. As opposed to bleak multi-story buildings where most residents share rooms along dark and dull corridors – places that look and feel like a hospital, a smaller residential home offers residents the look and feel of a homelike environment where no more than 5-6 people or at most a dozen residents live in real houses with their own private rooms to themselves and their own bathrooms too.
Feels Like Home
Small residential senior living homes feels like the resident is living in an environment closest to home because that is exactly what it is, a home. It gets rid of the sterile, bleak hospital-like environment that is commonplace in traditional, large facilities.
What a small residential senior home does is it tries to recreate a personalized, patient-centered care being provided to a loved one in a home-like environment. The main difference between a conventional, large senior care facility and a small, home-based one is the organizational structure.
In a traditional elder care home, the facilities are hierarchical, task-focused wherein large staff tend to place their energies on providing a strict routine of tasks for the benefit of the patients.
In a small senior living home facility, it is being run by a small and efficient cadre of self-managing teams and the patients are given freedom to determine how they want to live much like a home setup. In this scenario, the staff is in a better position to offer a higher quality of care that is focused on the needs and preferences of the resident.
Higher Quality of Life
Small residential senior living homes aim to provide a better quality of life for its residents. The facility is often designed to provide private rooms and bathrooms, ample and cozy living spaces where residents can gather together with each other or with visitors to socialize and thus gives it a more residential feel and look as opposed to a traditional nursing home.
The rooms provide plenty of natural light and provide ease of access to outdoor amenities and gardens. On top of that, the residents are given the freedom to set their own schedules in terms of when they want to get up out of bed, eat their food or when to go to bed at night. They are also able to get personalized, cooked-on premises meals as opposed to stale and restricted institutional food.
Can Meet Special Needs Requirement
Just because it feels like a home environment does not mean it cannot meet the special needs of a resident.
For any resident that requires special care regardless if it is a physician-ordered diet, a lifestyle choice such as being a vegan, a cognitive disability like dementia, or having a religion, culture or gender identity that does not necessarily place them in the majority, a small residential care home is the ideal solution.
These facilities are in a better position to more easily handle those needs, which can easily be overlooked in a larger setup.
