Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

loneliness. These plagues soon blossomed into principles, a biblical ten to be precise, and
today the international not-for-profit organization has grown in size. According to
Brownie, “at least 200 American aged care facilities have adopted the Eden Alternative’,
and there are ‘Eden Alternative facilities in the United Kingdom and Ireland; European
countries, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland; Scandinavia countries, including
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway; Japan, and other countries” (Brownie 2011).
The founders of the Eden Alternative idea describe their mission as being: “Dedicated to
transforming care environments into habitats for human beings that promote quality of
life for all involved.” It is a powerful tool for inspiring wellbeing for elders and those who
collaborate with them as care partners. Furthermore, managers working in long-term
care facilities that wish to ‘Edenize’ their institutions are encouraged to: “A) Treat
employees appropriately B) Ensure that decision-making is nearest the resident C)
Commit to changing the living/working environment and D) Persuade everyone to grow
continuously.”
In a nutshell, Eden’s ten principles are aimed at granting elders more decision-making
powers by reversing what is perceived as top-down bureaucracy. Lustbader and
Williams state that: “Shifting these ‘pyramids of power’ [the bureaucratic and power
structures topped by physicians an head nurses] turns out to be the essence of a
transformed culture of long-term care. Those who have the most contact with the ill
person, the nurse’s aides, must be given a primary voice on the health care team, and the
locus of control must be returned to the individual, rather than retained by the
institution and its staff” (Lustbader and Williams 2000, 647). Eden is also about creating
more human spaces: so that plants, pets, and visits by community children to the CCRC
provide, as stated on their website—‘a pathway to make life worth living’. The Eden
Alternative promotes both autonomy and dependence, sending potentially mixed
signals. On the one hand there is praise for self-reliance and individualism, yet on the
other there is a quiet recognition of the need for dependence and interdependence in
creating and sustaining social relations in places like Tacoma Pastures. Eden principle
four, which is framed in each Tacoma Pastures dining room, says that people are most
happy when they receive and offer help (see figure 12). Principle seven also stands out
in particular, which states: “Medical treatment should be the servant of genuine human
caring, never its master.”
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