b'BUILDING FOR THE FUTUREFamily-style living spaces, with small subclusters of interconnected units and bedrooms are key in the pursuit of creating long-term care homes with a strong social heartunderstanding the granularity of userselements, and duplication requiresresident satisfaction; increased staff day-to-day experiences and mappingmore money and more staff, inherentlyrecruitment, retention and satisfaction; out every decision in the context ofworking against lean design gains fromand, in all of these things, a higher resident life and staff workflows. a tighter floor plan and smaller quality of life for residents. LTCTsquare footage. Then, we must embrace the operational differences that comeBuild big, live small isnt just a designAlexandra Boissonneault with this thinking, scaling down theapproach but a model of care, oneis as Associate, Research traditional 32-bed Resident Home Areathat requires a fundamentally differentand Communications with (RHA) as much as possible into smallerphilosophical outlook at everyMontgomery Sisam Architects subclusters of interconnected, self- organizational level to be successful.Inc. Tony Ross is a Principal contained units with a limited number of bedrooms. Any degree of smaller isWhats the takeaway? with the firm. better in the pursuit of living small. More investment is being made in the long-term care sector than Finally, we try to create, in each ofever before. With this investment these clusters, a strong social heart,comes an opportunity to improve, to complete with open family-styleinnovate. We need efficient, effective kitchen, dining room and den-like livingworkplaces and safe, healthy homes area, and we couple this social heartwith higher quality living and caregiving with accessible, purposeful experience. And, in the absence of outdoor space.substantive policy change, we must pivot our thinking. The build big, live In the build big, live small model,small model is one way to incite real every element related to the residentprogress now.experience, from the hearth to the table to the garden, is scaled down toBut build big, live small is not without recreate the comfort and intimacy ofits challenges. This model of care relies home and day-to-day living. heavily on the human factor. And in the What is more, this exists within a wake of the pandemic, staff morale is larger building structure withoutlow and staffing shortages persist. impacting the efficiencies of itsback-of-house operations. We can only hope that with the promise of a better future, help will If its that easy, why isntcome and it will be inspired. Because everyone already doing it? building big to live small has the The reality is that you cannot operatecapacity to yield tremendous gains, the build big, live small model forincluding improvements in the overall the same cost as a traditional home.delivery and quality of care; improved Subclustering resident homes areasrelationships between residents and requires duplicating some programstaff; lower incident rates and higher www.oltca.com LONG TERM CARE TODAY 35'