Human Rights and the Confinement of People Living with Dementia in Care Homes

HumanRights4All-1200-x-30.jpg
Human Rights and the Confinement of People Living with Dementia in Care Homes
Published: Wednesday, June 24th 2020

Todays blog is an important Human Rights Law Journal article, Human Rights and the Confinement of People Living with Dementia in Care Homes published on 18 June 2020.

By Linda Steele, Ray Carr, Kate Swaffer, Lyn Phillipson, and Richard Fleming.

Abstract: This paper responds to growing concerns in human rights practice and scholarship about the confinement of people living with dementia in care homes. Moving beyond the existing focus in human rights scholarship on the role of restrictive practices in confinement, the paper broadens and nuances our understanding of confinement by exploring the daily facilitators of confinement in the lives of people with dementia. The paper draws on data from focus groups and interviews with people living with dementia, care partners, aged care workers, and lawyers and advocates about Australian care homes. It argues that microlevel interrelated and compounding factors contribute to human rights abuses of people living with dementia related to limits on freedom of movement and community access of people living with dementia, at times irrespective of the use of restrictive practices. These factors include immobilization and neglect of residents, limited and segregated recreational activities, concerns about duty of care and liability, apprehension of community exclusion, and pathologization and subversion of resistance. It is necessary to challenge the organizational, cultural, economic, and social dynamics that shape day-to-day, microlevel, routine, and compounding factors that remove the agency of people living with dementia and in turn facilitate entrenched and systematic human rights breaches in care homes.

You can download the full article here…

This article is one of three, as part of a research project many members of DAI were involved in as participants of the research, and at the Summit. The project ‘Safe and Just Futures of People Living with Dementia in Residential Aged Care’ aimed to explore:

  • current barriers to liberty and community access for people living with dementia in RACFs; and
  • the possibilities and challenges of utilising a human rights framework to transform the living and support arrangements of people living with dementia in RACFs.

The first published article, Questioning Segregation of People Living with Dementia in Australia: An International Human Rights Approach to Care Homes, was published last year, and the anthology and project report was published earlier this year, also available to download here.

#HumanRights4All


Support Dementia Alliance International


Check out these other blog posts

Author: Author Dave Carpenter
Published: 2024-12-17

Dave’s Lens: Capturing Hope and Raising Funds for Dementia Advocacy

Author: Author Kate Swaffer
Published: 2024-12-03

Nothing about US, without ALL of US.


Sign up for News, Articles and Blog

Text To Speech

Click text to start reading