‘Aiding the aging’ project finalized

The Gross Catholic High School engineering team decided to tackle the everpresent issue of aging with dignity.

Through an annual project in the high school’s extracurricular activity, the engineering team zeroed in on nursing home residents because these individuals have the fewest options, smallest voices, and face some of the most difficult challenges.

One student worked in a grocery store and noticed that older people struggle with certain tasks within the store. Also, this same student knew someone that had worked with the elderly in a care facility.

Another student on the team is CNA certified and has experience working with older adults.

In their investigation, the students determined major areas that they could seek to improve: Deciding on the outdated layout, design of nursing home rooms and the resident’s and caregiver’s experience.

Today the harsh reality is rooms in nursing homes are cramped, uncomfortable, and don’t provide personal accommodations. Aside from the physical room itself, there are many other inefficiencies present in nursing home settings.

On both the caregiver’s and resident’s ends, there are countless issues that have become a way of life for everyone involved.

At the end of their investigation, the students developed a goal to solve the problems that caregivers and residents have become all too familiar with.

To accomplish this goal, the engineering team determined the solution best fit to address the issues through a dignity-focused redesign of a skilled nursing facility resident’s room. Their room design includes much greater square footage, in addition to being augmented by innovative technology and personal accommodations.

This project will form the basis for a yearlong project next year where the entire school will reflect on the topic of aging and the elderly. This will be done through all school projects focused on themes of aging with dignity.

Room Design

The layout of a common nursing home is similar to a college dorm hall, with rooms lining long hallways and a somewhat cramped, utilitarian floor plan. Most rooms are doubles with a shared bathroom, which can cause issues between roommates because of the lack of privacy, as usually, only a curtain separates the two. This challenges owners to either repurpose previous apartments or dorms for nursing homes, or if the facility is built from scratch, cost-savings typically leads to non-optimal living experiences.

Caregivers

The caretakers of nursing homes face challenges that only increase as time goes on. Many nursing homes continue to use outdated, slow, and inefficient caregiver charting programs, negatively impacting both residents and caregivers. The shortage of healthcare workers has placed further strain on the already stressful duties of staff. Staff often spend much of their time on tasks that could either be automated or sped up by new designs.

Thanks to the resources and different guidance they received, the engineering team was able to successfully complete the project along with learning how to be sufficient engineers and innovators.