“If you’re talking to Teun, it’s bound to be about dementia.” That is the refrain of the friends of Teun Toebes, a remarkable nursing student from the Netherlands. At the age of 21, nearing the end of his studies and with a background in caring for patients with dementia, he made the radical decision to move into a nursing home to live as housemate, not employee. The result, this book, has already made waves in his homeland, where it was a bestseller and hand delivered to the prime minister.
Toebes’s account of his experience is a “heartfelt indictment”. Rather than rounding on the nursing staff – of which he is, still, committedly part – he urges people to remember what care is supposed to be about. His dual role – as housemate and carer – allows him to face both ways and to share his fellow workers’ frustrations. As with so much else in a modern, bottom-line economy, the enemy is a box-ticking levelling out, which favours risk-free, insurance-minded efficiency over a personalised model, which “cares for people” rather than determining “how to best care about them”. Toebes, now 24, takes this safety-first autocracy to task, criticising supplier monopolies, the favouring of robot dogs over the real, squeezable thing, the medicalisation of anyone deemed “difficult” and the use of television as a noisy sedative. The exterior and interiors of care homes are, he makes clear, demoralisingly featureless. Residents are made to feel second-class because of the removal of self-management and in other, more insidious ways too.
