Make Just One Change Today! Wayfinding

Care homes and hospitals are often especially difficult for wayfinding, with long, non-distinctive hallways and poorly differentiated routes. This can cause anxiety, distress, and decreased interaction in individuals with dementia.

Ideally wayfinding should be a main part of the design of any new facility. If the environment is already built, then some simple wayfinding interventions such as signage, furnishing, lighting, and colours can be addressed.

Creating a supportive environment to support wayfinding

Use signs with pictures and words that are a different colour from the background. This makes key places such as toilets and dining rooms easy to see.
Place signs centred at 1.2m from the floor as many older people tend to look down.
Use bright contrasting colours.
Personalise the entrance to bedrooms to make them more relevant to the individual.
Create landmarks that act as unique reference points such as murals and interactive furniture

There are so many good reasons to enhance the environment:

Living with dementia means coping with a range of issues. By enhancing the environment to compensate for deteriorating skills quality of life and overall wellbeing can be improved.

At Find, we have made it our business to understand the symptoms of dementia and the challenges that can arise. By putting the person at the heart of everything we do, we have worked with many care homes and hospitals across the country to enhance their environments.

We understand it can be difficult to know where to start and how to implement environmental changes for the maximum benefit of all involved in the process. That is why we offer a FREE no obligation environmental visit which will provide you with all the recommendations you need.

To find out more complete the Environmental Visit form here and one of our advisor will get back to you.