The Green House

Long term nursing care modeled on the idea of healthy human development? What a concept and long overdue. Makes sense too with the right people, the ones actually doing the care-giving, in charge.

Small World, The Green House, AARP Bulletin, Oct 05 and not available online.

"The Green House: It looks like home and feels like home. It's a new way of living when you need long term care"

A reinvented nursing home, developed by geriatrician William Thomas, and centered on the idea of healthy human development, a Green House creates small, intimate environments instead of large, impersonal institutions. Rather than long halls, there are small family-sized homes with 10 residents or fewer, each with private bedrooms and baths around a common area, each a "warm, loving, nurturing sanctuary."

In charge are the nurse's aides, usually the most over-worked, underpaid and disrespected, each of whom has been transformed with 200 hours of additional training into "shahbaz" (powerful falcon in Farsi) who blend the roles of caregiver, homemaker and friend. Before their jobs were too small for them, now they, like their patients, are blooming.

A Green House costs about the same as a regular nursing home, but exceeds on every other metric traditional nursing homes in the analysis of a study made on Tupelo Mississippi's Green Houses with traditional nursing homes by Rosalie Kane, a long term care expert at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health.