Re-imagining aging in society requires us to rehumanize care and spaces for the collective good with respect to older people.
Long-Term Residential Care (LTRC) in Quebec is in a crisis!
Although the architectural, organizational and political problems found at the core of Long-Term Residential Care design predate the Covid-19 pandemic, this crisis has raised awareness of the dire living conditions of a vulnerable population. The inability of the existing model to provide suitable services for residents also means inadequate working environments, which has caused a scarcity of available personnel, exacerbating this predicament (La Converse, 2021).
The misconception of care in LTRCs has only increased tensions towards aging in our society. Ageism impacts older people by removing their sensitive reality away from the public scene (Bellamy A, et al. 2020). In those isolated institutions designed like hospitals, residents don’t need to be cured, but accompanied towards the end with empathy. On the other hand, distressed frontline workers are not able to deliver such meaningful care because of the conditions the system implements upon them; overwork, precarity, low wages, poor worker retention, and burnout (Noorsumar, 2020).
Large, centralized institutions, the typology mostly developed in Quebec, have proven to be architecturally unresponsive regarding residents’ autonomy and continuation of daily life patterns. They created anxiety and fear towards the infrastructure’s scale, a lack of intimacy, while completely disconnecting older people from their surroundings and community.
