Bus Stop To Nowhere
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 6:00 PM
Here’s a bittersweet and amusing story out of Berlin.
A home for Alzheimer’s patients had trouble with clients wandering off.
The law doesn’t allow them to detain people against their will, so staff were forever running after people or worse, having to call the police to help locate them.
Creative and humane solution? A fake bus stop.
Benrath home teamed up with local care association called the ‘Old Lions’. They went to the Rheinbahn transport network which was happy to provide the bus stop to nowhere.
“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.
“We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later today and invite them in to the home for a coffee,” said Mr Neureither. “Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.”
The idea has been so successful it’s been adopted by homes across Germany.
With a polite nod to ninme.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
