Heather Wright/The Independent

There may be 10 new spaces for seniors at Lambton Meadowview. But those spaces will be unlike anything people here have seen before in long term care.
Jane Joris, the general manager of long term care in Lambton, says they’re looking at a different approach for people with dementia.
It would be more like home and hopefully quell some of the confusion which can occur when people move from a home to an institution.
“We’ve been looking for a couple of years of how we can support people with dementia better, who are having difficulty living in a traditional long term care setting,” Joris says.
“It’s crowded, you share a room with someone and …it’s so regimented. As much as we try and reduce that it’s still a lot of people together.”
And that is not easy for people with dementia who may wander and find structure difficult and don’t recognize workers who change constantly.
And it can lead to confrontation in a traditional home.
“They’re adults with lots of unique qualities that perhaps aren’t conducive to living with each other. So, they set each other off, …understandably.”
Joris is proposing a new 10 person unit on the grounds of the Petrolia home.
“It’s more of a family style way of living,” she says.
“Everybody has a private room, they have their own bathroom, they eat together, the workers would do a lot of things. So you know, there is not somebody coming into the PSW somebody coming in to be a dietary aide, someone coming in to be a cleaning aide. Everybody would have multi skills and, as much as possible, that people who live there would help us; it would be a partnership with them.”
That would include helping with meals and working around the building together.
“It’s more to meet the resident where they’re at. So, we try to do that in their in a traditional home, but the environment isn’t always supportive of that.”
“We have lots of land at Lambton Meadowview. We can have nice outdoor activity areas and which people need to be able to get outside, … particularly those people who come from a background where they spent a lot of time outside, you know, they need to be able to get outside, too.”
Joris hopes to get approval from Lambton County council and then apply for the licence for the beds. She says it could take two years to get the unit running if approved.