Innovative care village on schedule for 2025 opening.

Innovative care village on schedule for 2025 opening | The Press

The substantial brick building that draws the eyes of passers-by to the site of the rapidly developing Hawthorndale Care Village in Invercargill hides a great deal more than it reveals. You couldn’t tell from the street, but the other side of that building — which will itself contain a little mall — is a bespoke village of 13 care houses offering a total of 86 beds for people with various stages of dementia or elderly care needs. They will be integrated into a secure but companionable village society, to provide a normal, comforting life reminiscent of the villagers’ formative years. The $38 million project is well on track for its scheduled grand opening in May, with an initial intake of 72 residents scheduled to make the transition from Calvary Hospital. The construction side of the project has about four months left to run with five of the care homes fully completed.

An accompanying cluster of villas is already finished and the main care centre, which houses hairdressers, a coffee shop, theatre, chapel library and gym is ready for the finishing features. There is still work to be done on an accompanying playground where visiting youngsters will be able to disport themselves. All up it amounts to 4500 square metres of new building, which is why Maxis Projects construction manager Nick Hamlin is readying for the arrival of about 10,000 outdoor plants that form one part of the still major task of providing finishing touches of an appropriate scale.

At times, as many as 250 subcontractors have been working on the site. The footpaths between the houses have been designed so someone with dementia but self-mobile could still negotiate them safely. There’s a lot of colour-coding and other visual clues going on to help residents reorient themselves no matter what path they wander down. Calvary Hospital manager Margaret Brown, who was the initial champion for adapting the Dutch Hogeweyk dementia village model for Southland, said Hawthorndale was shaping up even better than she had envisaged. The care houses would each contain six or seven residents and the staff would try to connect the best-matched individuals based on how they’d lived their formative years. For instance those who had developed a liking for classical music would collectively be able to enjoy it — and music, well-chosen, was a particularly calming influence. Domestic memories would be carefully triggered. Each house had a kitchen where meals were prepared and, again, the smells of familiar food — say, a roast — being prepared would be part of the daily experience, rather than having prepared meals show up out of the blue.

In bedrooms there were sensors to detect when someone had left their bed or gone into the corridor, so the nurses would know they were up. For locational purposes patients could be geotagged with bracelets or tags in their clothes, and the village would be geofenced. These security systems were designed to be as unobtrusive as possible to retain a homely feel “without a lot of bells and buzzers’’, Hamlin said. Brown was particularly pleased that although some houses would be premium quality, the majority would be good quality, but standard, so the not-for-profit trust could make them more affordable. In the provision of elderly care facilities “that’s getting more and more unusual’’, she said. Southland Times

In the main care centre building, work was continuing on the residents’ library, and chapel — which would include the leadlight glass windows from Calvary Hospital, dairy with an old-fashioned canopy outside, and a theatre showing generally older movies, but also including a stage. The gymnasium would have equipment ranging from stationary bikes and — yep — a punching bag, to more specialist machines adapted for wheelchair users. “We do put a lot of effort into physio,’’ Brown said. “We want to keep everyone walking as long as we can.’’ Residents able to exercise choice over their daily lives were found to be more active and need less medication than those in a traditional care home. Hawthorndale would also seek to be much more connected to the outside community, down to the coffee shop being designed as a place not just for residents and their visitors, but passers by wanting to duck in to grab a morning coffee, or to catch up with friends.

Project manager Helen Robinson said, “It’s always been our big drive to bring the community in, so this is not just a place people come purely because of their need for care. “We’ve built a playground so kids could come to see granny, or great granny, but also know it’s somewhere for them to hang out and have a good time. We absolutely want it to be somewhere people want to spend time.” Ultimately, Brown said, the ambition was not for the Hawthorndale model to be strikingly special, but to show that the village approach did work and, in turn, encourage others providers to adopt it.