Make nursing homes truly a home for residents

For more than a decade, I have been a resident doctor at a nursing home run by a voluntary welfare organisation.

I hope nursing homes here have a change of direction: Towards creating a home for the resident, becoming less clinical and more people-centred, where the residents decide for themselves what they want.

For example, homes where their privacy is important; where they can wear their own clothes and decide when to bathe; where they can choose what is on the menu; and where they can have live-in animals such as cats, dogs, birds, hamsters and rabbits to provide evidence-based pet therapy.

Dr Bill Thomas, who revolutionised nursing homes in the United States through the Eden Alternative, wrote that people in nursing homes face a prevalent disease.

“Heart disease? Diabetes? Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s? Ironically, this is a disease of the heart, with three important symptoms: Loneliness, helplessness and boredom,” he said.

The Health Ministry should emulate such holistic models of long-term care when setting up its “model” nursing homes. (“MOH may run its own nursing homes”; Aug 1)