Home sweet … facility?
If I asked anyone to finish this saying, Home sweet …, we would all say, Home sweet home.
Just for kicks, try saying this out loud, Facility sweet facility. No one says that. It seems as if that, in and of itself, perhaps makes the point.
Do you see and feel and maybe even get engulfed in the prevailing medical and clinical care focus? I suggest we call out the pressure to be clinical. We don’t have to be so clinical. Nothing says we have to be. It’s not in the regulations. We just got suckered into it because it is the prevailing atmosphere. But it doesn’t have to be.
Take this as a litmus test:
Answering honestly, which lens do you look through?
- This is a professional place of work.
- This is a home where people live.
What if you, we all, viewed it first and foremost as someone else’s home that we get to work in? What if we rejected the clinical only focus for a living life focus. We could be leading this!
In real life, in normal life, outside of institutional life, people live in homes.
The word facility means building, and yes, it is a building, but when people live in a building it becomes a home.
When we sit at a conference center, that is a facility, and it deserves the title. Why? Because it is not a home. It is not anyone’s home. Not a home = facility.
Care center ends up in the same category of words that don’t reflect home. Do people want to live in a center or a home? Do people live in centers? What is a center? Where do you see the title in your real life? Rec center? Senior center? Center usually means the same thing facility means, not a home.
Then there is the term homelike. What does homelike mean? Try to answer it. Its right in the word… like home which actually ends up admitting … this is not home. Homelike = not home.
What does home mean?
What do you see that is home, of home, true home?
I have done a lot of work with language and have come to realize that it holds tremendous power. We each take a breath and then say a word. The word will either keep perpetuating the institutional model … or not. Each of our words can intentionally be used to shift from the monstrous institutional tsunami to instead leading the creation of home and normal life. Just with our words. Oh and it costs no money.
Let’s keep HOME in nursing home and LIVING in assisted living!
A free resource is The Power of Language to Create Culture at www.edu-catering.com.
Carmen Bowman, MHS, Regulator turned Educator of Edu-Catering: Catering Education for Compliance and Changing Institutional Culture is an activities/engagement, regulatory compliance and culture change consultant. She offers new or not-yet-qualified activity director consultation and personalized continuing education for professionals/teams/associations. Also, a new eResource GUARDIANS OF NORMAL LIFE: How Activity/Recreation/Engagement/Community Life Professionals can Save the World of LTC at www.edu-catering.com. See lots of normal life and its positive outcomes at the Edu-Catering YouTube Channel. Become a champion of changing institutional culture back to normal life!
