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While alcohol addiction affects families in the thousands across the United States, there is a growing, if not larger, number of people who are affected when their loved ones are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. An article that was published earlier this year in Telegraph.co.uk talked about how German nursing homes were using a strategy to help stop Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off: a fake bus stop.

As many of us know, people with Alzheimer’s (depending on the severity of each individual case) have a tendency to wander off. In more sever cases of Alzheimer’s, where the person has actually been placed into a nursing home or some other type of assisted care, many patients will try to leave the premises in order to return to places where they used to live or to visit families. So, where do they go? Typically, they will seek out mass transportation in the form of buses, taxis or trains- things that are usually close to where they are staying at the present time and also which are not too far away so that they don’t forget where they’re going on the way there.

One German nursing home named Benrath Senior Centre decided to use phantom bus stops by creating an exact replica of a standard stop outside the premises. The buses do not use it and the nursing home, according to the article, has been forced to rely on the assistance of police in order to retrieve patients who wanted to return to their often non-existent families and homes. The Benrath Senior Centre teamed up with a local care association called the “Old Lions” who went to the Rheinbahn transport network (which supplied the bus stop).

Although it sounds like a crazy idea, members of the staff claim that it is working, with one member stating,

They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home….We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later and invite them in for a coffee. Five minutes later, they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.

According to the article, this idea of a “phantom bus stop” has been so successful that is has been adopted by several other nursing homes.

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Tags: Addiction, Alcoholism, Recovery, Relapse Prevention //