Doors Of Dementia Patients’ Houses Recreated To Make Them Feel More Like Home

A Netherlands-based company has launched an amazing project to make dementia patients in institutions feel more at home. True Doors creates unique stick-on doors for seniors and people with special needs living in care facilities. The decals are specially designed to look like the doors of the homes in which the residents previously lived.

True Doors’ first project was at De Weidevogelhof, a care facility in South Holland where many residents have dementia.

Clients were able to choose from designs similar to the doors of their homes, or request specially designed doors.

Often, when the elderly are moved into institutions they feel a loss of identity, personal freedom and sense of home.

The doors allow residents to keep alive a part of their lives they had thought lost forever.

Staff say the doors liven up the institution and make it more appealing to patients and visitors.

The doors also help the facility run more smoothly. Familiar doorways make rooms easier to identify, meaning residents are more likely to recognise their own room and less likely to mistakenly enter someone else’s.

The creative designs have also fostered relationships within the home, with an increase in social interaction between residents and with staff through discussion about the doors and the patients' former homes.

“I’ve lived behind that door for 30 years," remembers Ms. van der Kooy, a resident of the nursing home, who now lives behind a replica of that door. “When I was age 84 I returned the key."

But now, with help from the True Doors project, the doors and their stories live on.