Residential and Nursing Care Market Position Statement 2025 - 2040 - Different models of care

De Hogeweyk is a gated model village at Weesp in the Netherlands. Designed specifically for people with dementia. No one wears a uniform and the village is designed around a series of streets and places. It has a supermarket, bar, shops and small-scale homes. 

This approach can now be found in the UK. Homes run WCS Care cater for 450 residents across 12 sites, old and new, with a thirteenth home recently granted planning permission. It’s newest home, Castle Brook in Kenilworth, Warwickshire is designed around six households of 14 people, each with a kitchen at their heart. The goal of the scheme is to design a care home around the everyday rhythms of life: going shopping, doing the washing up, helping with the cooking, laying the table. The model is therefore more akin to an Extra Care Living Scheme than a traditional care home. 

There is provision of healthcare on site, with a dedicated health clinic offering GP and dentistry services. There is a waiting room, so the experience mimics the real world as closely as possible. The philosophy behind the scheme is freedom. The culture of the home is that everything should be driven by residents’

Technology will be central to care homes of the future. Castle Brooks Care Home in uses acoustic monitoring overnight. Sensors monitor sound levels in residents’ rooms using algorithms that react to a range of noises. They then send email alerts to the monitoring station, which helps staff to assess whether any assistance is needed. This has drastically reduced the number of in-person checks, which often disturb residents. This offers peace of mind for residents and their families, and protection for staff.

The care home knew that typically there were 15 residents wide awake in the middle of the night. Instead of putting them to bed, it formed a “wide awake club” and engaged with the residents, playing games and doing jigsaws, eating meals, or having manicures or their hair styled in the salon, eating meals, doing crafts and jigsaws. The goal was to help them sleep at night by readjusting their body clocks. Over a short period, the number of wide-awake residents fell from 15 to just three.

Croft Communities is a registered charity based in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland offers residential, supported housing, respite and day-care options for adults of all ages with learning difficulties. Croft Communities seeks to provide housing, care and support using a holistic approach to meet the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of those that avail of their services. It currently offers nine residential places providing care in the communal Mayne House, 34 tenants in supported living accommodation, enabling a more independent lifestyle, and seven respite places in the recently opened Croft Lodge, which serves around 100 families. It also has a day care service offering meaningful activities for 27 people from Croft and the wider community. It is therefore more of a mixed care and support model of which residential care is one element.

A Danish ‘Nursing Home of the Future’ (the name of the care home) is located near Limfjorden in Nørresundby and offers its residents nice, bright flats and also invites them into common areas that bear little resemblance to an institution in the traditional sense.

The building was designed by Nørkær+Poulsen Architects and Østergaard Architects and their vision was to open the facility to the outside world. For example, the restaurant is designed so people other than the care home’s 75 residents can come and eat there. The fitness area is used not only by the residents but also by seniors who live in the area. There are a lot of informal lounges, small kitchenettes, reading rooms and other themed spaces.

The intention of the architects was to create more life in the nursing home making it more vibrant and inspirational for those inhabitants that were missing their normal interactions. Especially in the common areas noise could potentially become an issue if not controlled. A risk was that the elderly inhabitants could not enjoy the conversations simply because of poor acoustics. Acoustic ceiling tiles were installed in all the common areas and corridors in the building ensuring optimal noise control. Rockfon Sonar X was the preferred solution both due to its acoustic properties but also because the grid system was concealed and the design gave a homelier feel to the space. 

For the residents, this is their final home and the architects have tried to be very respectful of this by designing a building that looks very inviting and warm. Knowing that a nursing home is characterised by trolleys in the hallway, kitchens being used, people visiting, talks in the corridors – noises that you will not have in your own home – it was vital for the architects that when you were in your own flat these noises were kept out. The acoustic ceilings helped lower the noise levels as well as retain the noise as much as possible to accommodate for the architect’s vision of building a “home” instead of an institution.