Life Worth Living: How Someone You Love Can Still Enjoy Life in a Nursing Home - The Eden Alternative in Action (Paperback)

by William H. Thomas (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
Most American nursing homes spend far too much time treating chronic diseases and too little time providing compassionate care, asserts the author, a physician and former director of the Chase Memorial Nursing Home. In 1991, Thomas decided to try a different approach to life for the 80 residents of this upstate New York facility?an approach he calls the Eden Alternative. Motivated by a desire to enrich the home's physical and social environment, the staff introduced hundreds of indoor plants, 80 parakeets, dogs, cats, and other living things to share life with residents. Lawns became vegetable gardens, tended by staff and residents. A day-care center, after-school programs, and a summer camp brought children into the home. This book is an inspiring account of Edenizing this particular home, emphasizing the benefits to residents and staff. Although it offers how-to steps for humanizing homes elsewhere, it lacks the specifics needed to help the Eden Alternative succeed in larger, urban nursing facilities and other settings. Also not covered are difficulties this approach may present (e.g., demented residents who may be frightened of animals). For strong aging collections.?Karen McNally Bensing, Benjamin Rose Inst. Lib., Cleveland
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
There is at last an alternative for those who see nursing homes as little more than glorified hospitals. Dr. Thomas, a nursing home medical director in upstate New York, offers the Eden Alternative in which the loneliness, helplessness, and boredom of life in a conventional facility are obliterated and "care" is substituted for superficial "treatment." Thomas provides frighteningly simple methods for dropping long-held assumptions about nursing homes and turning them into places where residents can have reasons to live. He replaces the overmedication, treatment plans, and restricted diets of traditional homes with gardens, pets, plants, and children. His book gives concrete plans for implementing the Eden Alternative, assesses and debunks its risks, and suggests methods to empower nursing home staff, who, in turn, empower their residents. The 10 Eden Principles can be enacted by any facility that desires to help the elderly reconnect with the world and put the "home" back into nursing home. This book offers a splendid solution for those who feel that death might be the best alternative to old age. A provocative, inspiring, hopeful work. Patricia Hassler

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Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Vanderwyk & Burnham; 1 edition (September 25, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964108968
• ISBN-13: 978-0964108967
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #418,114 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Ombudsman's point of view, June 15, 1999

By	Rev. Wayne Bradley Robinson, Ph.D. (Antelope, CA USA) - See all my reviews

As a Regional Ombudsman, responsible for a large county in N. CA, I used this book to inspire people to form a "Family Council" in a sample nursing home and to lobby for the changes that Thomas recommends. The home adopted several of the changes and they transformed the home, once known as the worst in the county into the best. Several people emerged from years of depression, others simply took a whole new interest in life, others simply had whole-hearted laughter reenter their lives for the fist time in years. The Eden alternative is indeed the "recipe" for making one's years in long term care "worth living."

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thomas advocates for a revolution in Nursing Home care., June 25, 1998

By A Customer

I am a Regional Ombudsman for a county in Northern California with responsibility for 970 Skilled Nursing "beds", so I see first hand what happens even in the "best" of Nursing Homes. This book, if taken seriously represents such a profound, yet so seemingly simple approach, that nursing homes would become "homes" for the first time - places where one could look forward to living out one's last years still growing and still having a reason for living. One nursing home in my district is beginning to implement it and one example will suffice. There was a woman who was so severely depressed, nothing could reach her - no drugs, no therapy, nothing! Then the facility put a cockatiel across from her room (part of Thomas'"Eden Plan.") Ever so slowly, she started to take an interest in that bird. Then she got out of bed on her own for the first time so she could see it better. Then she crossed the hall and started talking to the bird. Then she started talking to other residents and to the staff. Her depression was gone. A simple bird had done what no drugs, no therapists, nothing else could do. And that is but a tiny part of the picture. This particular nursing home has gone from what many considered to be the worst home (it's name among the people outside was "Hellhaven")in my district to, in my opinion, the best, and they are just getting started! Read this great book. You won't be able to put it down and it will change the way look at nursing homes forever. Rev. Wayne Bradley Robinson, Ph.D., Regional Ombudsman for Placer County, California. [e-mail]

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life Worth Living: How Someone You Love Can Still Enjoy Lif, December 9, 1999

By	A. Walters (Chicago, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book will show how to turn a cold clinical facility into a warm, caring home. A place families want to visit, not make exuses to avoid. This truly can be revolutional. Anyone placing a person into a nursing facility should make sure they have Edenized.