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Residential advanced dementia care is often hard on the patients, their families, and their caregivers.

An institution in the Netherlands has revolutionized advanced dementia care.

The Hogeweyk creates as familiar a living environment as possible for dementia residents.

The Hogeweyk focuses on engagement in preserved interests and activities in its advanced dementia residents.

Imagine enabling people with severe dementia to live out their final months actively pursuing many of the interests and activities they had enjoyed throughout their lives, rather than being segregated from family and friends, sequestered into spartan hospital-like facilities, and medicated and sedated to near unconsciousness. Well, that is precisely the goal of the Hogeweyk, a residential dementia care facility located just a short train ride from the heart of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Just a Typical Nursing Home

The center was formerly akin to most nursing homes—a one-size-fits-all experience for residents with long disorienting corridors of monotonous colorless resident rooms, overtaxed nurses, aides dispensing medications and meals on rigid schedules, residents spending much of their days deposited to unobtrusive corners of hallways and dayrooms, bored family members affecting shorter and shorter visits, limited interaction between residents, and an institutional focus on what residents could no longer accomplish for themselves.

But then, a team of visionary professionals decided to flip the script. Residents were to be seen as and treated as individual independent beings—with their own personalities, values, past experiences, pursuits, pass-times, likes, and interests. Rather than treating residents as patients with a relentlessly progressive disease—losing function daily—the center focused on who each resident was throughout their lives and what they retained of their personas, their interests, and their activities, despite the disease. They were grouped by such retained qualities and encouraged to maintain them—even develop them further—independently and/or with others, with........

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