The Null Device

Bus to nowhere

A nursing home in Düsseldolf has come up with a novel way of dealing with stray Alzheimer's patients; they set up a fake bus stop outside the home:
“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

There are 1 comments on "Bus to nowhere":

Posted by: gjw http://atriplex.info Mon Jun 9 22:55:05 2008

My wife, who worked in aged care for years, tells me this isn't new, in fact it's quite common. The last nursing home she worked for in Adelaide had a fake bus stop. Another nursing home she knew about in Melbourne actually had a bus - they used the facility's minibus to pick up patients at the bus stop, then drive them around the block to the back door to let them off again, several times a day!