Temporary residential facilities in the municipality of Copenhagen
Eigil Boll Hansen and Stella Mia Sieling
The municipality of Copenhagen has during the past three years established 12 places in a temporary residential facility where citizens themselves can book a temporary stay. The target group is citizens aged 65 years or more living at home but feeling insecure alone at home due to e.g. illness or a fall or a social episode such as a burglary in the neighbourhood or a relation’s hospitalisation. During 2008 the target group was extended to include older citizens where the relatives who usually take care of them are away on vacation. Residents are assumed to be self-reliant in normal everyday life and must not require specially trained personnel or special facilities. During their stay they receive the same care etc. as residents in an old people’s home. The stay is fixed at three weeks maximum. Residents themselves pay for food and laundry etc.
The aim of this evaluation is to contribute to our knowledge of how such facilities, where citizens themselves book their stay, relieve a critical situation for elderly people with little need for care and how things can be planned so residents receive the best possible benefit. The evaluation is based on statistical information on the use of temporary residential facilities, interviews with a small number of residents, interviews with the staff and the resident’s usual home help.
The evaluation concludes that there is a need for short-term closer supervision and respite care than home care can offer. Places where elderly people can enrol for short stays can give them a feeling of security by knowing that there is a place they can approach, if the problems are piling up. The offer seems to be used by the relevant target group for whom a stay in a temporary environment can help them through a critical period.
First of all it seems to be the feeling of security gained by staying in a temporary environment while regaining both physical and mental strength that is of beneficial importance. But during the stay, it is also important to be aware of the possibilities to support the development of the citizens’ ability to manage in their own home.
In long periods, the 12 temporary residential places have not been used at full capacity. This raises the question of whether there have been too many places available, so the need could be covered by fewer places. However, it may be that awareness of these places has been insufficient among the public and the health care professionals.
As mentioned, enrolling into a short-term temporary residence implies that the citizen is almost self-reliant and this evaluation does not provide a basis for pointing to the expediency of changing this general rule. It is more complicated for professionals to evaluate an applicant’s level of self-reliance over the telephone when contacted about a place. Furthermore, there is a risk that if the demand for self-reliance is reduced, the places can get clogged up with care-requiring residents who find it difficult to return to their own homes.
The evaluation cannot give an answer to whether a formal maximum length of stay of three weeks is the optimal solution. The staff at the residential facility estimate that three weeks is too short a time to recover for many people and 45% of residents have had a stay of more than three weeks. So this indicates that the formal maximum length of stay should be prolonged. On the other hand, similar experiences from the municipality of Gladsaxe indicate that a shorter length of stay for a similar target group can work in practice. Here the maximum stay was only two weeks and a little more than 60% left within this time limit. There seems to be a relation between the maximum length of stay and the average length of stay, which indicates that the average length of stay in temporary residential facility increases if the official maximum length of stay is increased.
The basis for estimating how much a citizen gets out of such a stay is limited, as we only have information about and from ten citizens. Among those, a majority has benefitted positively by way of being more cheerful and functioning better. The citizens recovered their strength and there was general satisfaction with the stay. A sizeable majority of citizens return to their own homes. So there is hardly any doubt that a stay in such a facility has had a beneficial effect on many people, but we have no basis for estimating how far a stay in a temporary residential facility has contributed to recovery. However, there is a group who, after their return home, need for special attention and some might need extra help, which is also organised in a number of cases. Others may for example need sustained training or being able to participate in a social activity together with others – and here it is important to use the knowledge the staff at the temporary facility has gained about the resident.
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