Bay Side Home
Providing Comprehensive Care
Providing Comprehensive Care
Click here to add a short description
The Eden Alternative
The Eden Alternative
At Bay Side Home in Barrington, Nova Scotia, we look at long-term care in a different light. The Eden Alternative is our way of remaking the experience of ageing. We believe in the saying that ageing should not be a period of decline, be a continuous process of development and growth. In other words, we want to make life worth living for our residents.
The Ten Principles of the Eden Approach:
The Ten Principles of the Eden Approach:
- The three plagues of loneliness, helplessness, and boredom account for the bulk of suffering among our elders.
- An Elder-centered community commits to creating a Human Habitat where life revolves around close and continuing contact with plants, animals and children. It is these relationships that provide the young and old alike with a pathway to a life worth living.
- Loving companionship is the antidote to loneliness. Elders deserve easy access to human and animal companionship.
- An Elder-centered community creates opportunity to give as well as receive care. This is the antidote to helplessness.
- An Elder-centered community imbues daily life with variety and spontaneity by creating an environment in which unexpected and unpredictable interactions and happenings can take place. This is the antidote to boredom.
- Meaningless activity corrodes the human spirit. The opportunity to do things that we find meaningful is essential to human health.
- Medical treatment should be the servant of genuine human caring, never its master.
- An Elder-centered community honours its Elders by de-emphasizing top-down bureaucratic authority, seeking instead to place the maximum possible decision-making authority into the hands of the Elders or into the hands of those closest to them.
- Creating an Elder-centered community is a never-ending process. Human growth must never be separated from human life.
- Wise leadership is the lifeblood of any struggle against the three plagues. For it, there can be no substitute.
Source: http://www.edenalt.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eden_Overview_092613LR.pdf