Our challenge within the Da Vinci Project was to find a unique solution to reduce the driven kilometers of EVEAN by 10%. EVEAN is a healthcare provider in North-Holland that provides home care and nursing homes focused on special care. We quickly found out that the problem was larger than only the number of kilometers driven, and that the whole system needed to change to make healthcare more sustainable, cost-efficient, and time efficient. Especially when the number of patients needing care is increasing in the Netherlands, and the number of nurses will remain the same or reduce.
Our prototype consist of two nursing homes. One represents the current situation, where in general the elderly are not happy to live in. The second one is the improved ‘nursing home,’ with a more attractive design. Here, multiple generations, not necessarily from the same family, are living. It is a multi-generational house where the elderly can watch over the grandchildren when the parents are working, and where healthy adults can provide some care for the elderly. In this way, less nurses are needed. Where the care is still needed, the patients would be all in the same location, therefore reducing the amount of kilometers driven. In this way, the quality of the care could remain the same or even improve. Furthermore, with our prototype we strive to tackle the problem of the elderly feeling like an isolated part of society where being alone most days is the norm. With this multigenerational living, we would create a small society of people of various ages which would inevitably result in the elderly being an important part of a social group. Taking care of the environment should always be intertwined with taking care of people, and with our prototype we aim to do exactly that.
