Eden Alternatives

Eden Alternative Program (TM)

LakeWood Care Center is a registered Eden Alternative facility. The intent of the Eden Alternative is to create a home-like environment by incorporating plants and animals into daily life at the Care Center. Visitors, and especially children, are welcome and are encouraged to drop by to spend time with the residents. The Eden philosophy is that plants, dogs, cats, birds and children play an important part in lessening the three plagues of the elderly: loneliness, boredom, and helplessness.

Principles of Eden Alternative

1. Understand that loneliness, helplessness, and boredom account for the bulk of suffering in a typical nursing home.

2. Commit itself to surrendering the institutional point of view and adopts the human habitat mode, which makes pets, plants, and children the axis around which daily life in the nursing home turns.

3. Provides easy access to companionship by promoting close and continuing contact between the elements of human habitat and nursing home residents.

4. Provides daily opportunities to give as well as receive care by promoting resident participation in the daily round of activities necessary to maintain the human habitat.

5. Imbue daily life with variety and spontaneity by creating an environment in which unexpected and unpredictable interactions and happenings can take place.

6. De-emphasizes the programmed activities approached to life and devotes those resources to the maintenance and growth of the human habitat.

7. De-emphasize the role of prescription drugs in the residents’ daily lives and commits those resources to the maintenance and growth of the human habitat.

8. De-emphasizes top-down bureaucraticauthority in the nursing home and seeks instead to place the maximum possible decision-making authority in the hands of those closest to the resident.

9. Understands that "Edenizing" is a process, not a program, that the Human Habitat, once created, should be helped to grow and develop like any other living thing.

10. Is blessed with leadership that places the need to improve resident quality of life over and above the inevitable objections to change: leadership is the lifeblood of the Edenizing process, and for it there is no substitute.