Heathcote Dementia Alliance reaches milestone in dementia care cabin project

The cabin, named Costerfield House in reference to the Mandalay Resources' mine after the company donated significant funding to the project, would be fully fitted out to suit dementia patients' needs and utilise technology to assist carers.

Costerfield House would be display only, designed to explore potential advancements to dementia care.

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At a sod turning presentation, HDA president and founder Sandra Slatter said the facility was expected to arrive in late April after being manufactured in Red Cliffs, near Mildura.

"[We've] had all these ups and downs; we had COVID and then we started the manufacturing of it in Rochester and they were flooded," she said.

"When it arrives here, it'll go on site and we will work with the local community to do a fit out."

Ms Slatter said HDA had worked with dementia experts across the world and was working towards gold certification from Dementia Services Development Centre in the UK.

The cabin would be naturally ventilated with furniture and fixtures consisting of distinct colours and contrasting hues, Ms Slatter said.

Rooms would have unobtrusive wayfinding and light switches, while electrical sockets would be easily accessible and cupboards would be transparent to make it easy to identify contents.

The building would also be fitted out with artificial intelligence and assistive technology, which could support dementia patients through software that predicts falls.

One cabin cost $170,000 with the technology costing another $20,000, Ms Slatter said.

The project is separate to the Heathcote Dementia Village, which failed to secure funding and land earlier this year.

Ms Slatter said with further investment HDA would look at creating clusters of care cabins, with land already secured for a cluster in Merbein.

HDA had been working with Heathcote Health since 2014, and chief executive Dan Douglass said the care cabin would be on site for display and education purposes, "to start to break down barriers around what accommodation options people with dementia and their carers in the future may have available".

"The beauty of the care cabins being relocatable is that they can be placed either on the house block, some already lives in find when we go out to care for someone in the community that the house isn't suitable," he said.

"We can potentially monitor remotely as well as providing in reach support; I think it's just a game changer for us.

"People can unobtrusively be monitored for their health conditions without intruding on their privacy and then we can get either predictive or preventive information to help them avoid falls or medication errors or whatever it might be."

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Mr Douglass said the ageing population of Heathcote prompted a look into how dementia patients were looked after.

"Over a third of our population is aged over 65, if you go into aged care, you'll find that roughly 50 per cent of people that enter aged care have a form of dementia," he said.

"Our average age is 57 so we will see all of the aging and chronic disease needs before a lot of other areas, and that's true for most rural places.

"There is no doubt that demand for dementia care will significantly increase ... we looked at dementia because we can actually see on the projections that the demand without a cure is going to significantly increase."

Mr Douglass said dementia diagnoses were "soul-destroying" for the patient and their loved ones.

"If we can actually make that journey and experience along the way as positive as possible, that's what we are sort of looking to do," he said.

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