District - Dementia and vacation, can they be combined?
Yes, says the Alzheimer Gesellschaft Lechrain eV self-help dementia and has created a corresponding offer itself, the “dementia-sensitive vacation on the farm”.
After the first season, however, the conclusion was still “ambiguous”, says 1st chairwoman Doris Kettner.
In the old district of Schongau and in the district of Landsberg, the society is involved, and the joint activities for people with dementia and their relatives also include trips to a farm near Lake Staffelsee.
This offer has been very well received, says Doris Kettner happily.
During discussions with farming families and the responsible associations and interest groups, the idea quickly came up to include those farms that were already offering “farm holidays”.
This led to a collaboration with the Farm and Country Holidays in the Bavarian Alps, because: "The Lechrain and the Pfaffenwinkel are holiday regions with tradition, which are shaped by culture and farms - just as one imagines Bavaria", explains Doris Kettner .
The thought: some farm holiday rental providers receive guests who come for a relaxing vacation with a family member or spouse with early or early middle dementia. “And we put in a kind of safety net for this,” says Kettner. Before this summer season, the Dementia Partner Initiative of the Deutsche Alzheimer Gesellschaft eV trained the hosts, Doris Kettner and her team looked around the farms and are the contact point for queries and problems in the background.
“It was important for the providers to know in advance that they did not have to take on any nursing activities. But in the end, it turned out during the discussions that all of our holiday providers had already had personal experience of dementia in the family and therefore had a certain sensitivity to this topic, ”explains Doris Kettner. The hosts in the past summer season were the Rudolf and Schelle families from Böbingen, the Scholz family in Burggen and Agnes Gstöttenbauer in Irschenberg.
On the one hand, the project met with a “great response”, says Doris Kettner happily: the Federal Association of the German Alzheimer's Society and the Dementia Partner Initiative were full of praise and made recommendations;
the magazine alzheimeraktuell reported and reisemaulwurf.de, an internet platform for people in need of help and care and their relatives who care for them, caught the attention.
But this year only twelve booking inquiries reached the four hosts;
There was no stay.
What was noticeable about the contacts received was that all interested parties came from further away.
From Augsburg, but also from Braunschweig and Dortmund, for example.
For Kettner, one thing is certain: The offer is also aimed at people with dementia and their relatives from the local region who want to spend a few nice days together.
For two of this year's inquiries, the desired date was already booked, all the others would have needed care or support.
"We are currently considering whether we can do that," describes Doris Kettner.
"We need a very flexible partner for this."
She wants to use the coming weeks to push ahead with the dementia-sensitive vacation project.
Further information can be found on the Internet at www.alzheimer-lechrain.de.