French ‘Alzheimer’s village’: where nursing home meets the outside world

Reuters - 01/10/2020 - Residents of the purpose-built village near Dax in southwestern France shop for groceries, get pampered at the hair salon and enjoy music recitals just like anyone else. But this is no ordinary gated community - each of its 105 permanent residents has Alzheimer's disease. The village offers the care of a nursing home in an environment dressed up as the outside world to soften any sense of painful rupture with the past, preserving a measure of autonomy and daily routine that may help slow the advance of dementia. Madeleine Elissalde, 82, was among the first to move in when the village, the first in France and modelled on one in the Netherlands, opened in June. She says she likes the surrounding countryside and the shared house she lives in. "It's like being at home," Elissalde said. "We're well looked after." For a while after she was diagnosed, Elissalde lived with her daughter before moving in with another of her children...

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Posted on 1 October, 202022 October, 2020