Who Belongs Here: What Inclusivity Actually Looks Like in a Dementia Care Home

Inclusivity is one of those words that gets used so often it starts to lose its shape. You see it on websites, in mission statements, in the kind of language that's meant to signal good intentions without really saying much. I want to try to say something real about it instead.

At The Vibe, when we talk about inclusivity, we're not talking about a policy. We're talking about a question we come back to constantly: who is this place actually built for, and who might be quietly slipping through the cracks?

The honest answer, in most dementia care homes, is that the place was built with a pretty specific person in mind. Older. Often white. Often from a background where the care system felt at least somewhat familiar, if not exactly comfortable. And a lot of what gets called 'standard care' was designed around that person, their routines, their comfort foods, their music, their frame of reference.

That leaves a lot of people on the outside of 'standard.'

It leaves the person whose first language isn't English, who is trying to hold onto words that are already slipping, and who now has to do it in a second language because that's what the people around them speak. It leaves the person whose food, the food that means home and safety and love to them, isn't anywhere on the menu. It leaves the person who came up in a tradition where asking for help from strangers feels like a last resort, not a first one. It leaves the person who is younger than anyone expected, still sharp in some ways, still aware of what's happening, and looking around a room where nobody seems to be in the same chapter of life.

I've said before that early onset dementia is something most care systems weren't built for. A person in their 50s, maybe still thinking about work, still connected to children who are in high school or college, still listening to music that most care homes would never think to put on, that person deserves a place that actually sees them. Not just accommodates them. Sees them.

The same is true for someone whose cultural identity is central to who they are. Dementia doesn't erase that. Sometimes it makes it more present, not less. A person may lose the ability to track a conversation in English long before they lose the ability to respond to a song from their childhood, or the smell of a dish their mother made, or a ritual that's been part of their life for decades. If the place they're living in has no connection to any of that, the loss compounds.

That's where the five pillars we build around at The Vibe matter in a practical way. Food is medicine, but it's also memory and identity. Music awakens memory, but only if the music is actually theirs. Connection heals, but connection requires being known, and being known requires someone taking the time to find out who a person actually is, not just what their diagnosis says.

We keep our home small on purpose. Not because small is easier to manage, but because small means you can actually know your Guests. You can know that one person gets agitated when the room is too loud, and another one lights up when you put on a certain kind of gospel music, and another one spent forty years gardening and still reaches for a trowel when she's near the raised beds outside. You can know that someone's family speaks a different language and make sure there's a real effort to bridge that, not just a shrug and a workaround.

Inclusion isn't a program you add on. It's a way of paying attention.

I'll be honest: we don't get this right every time. There are gaps. There are people we could serve better if we knew more, if we had more language skills or more cultural reach or more time. That's worth saying out loud too, because the alternative is pretending that declaring a commitment to inclusivity is the same as achieving it, and those are very different things.

What I can say is that the question stays on the table. When we're thinking about menus, it's on the table. When we're thinking about music programming, it's on the table. When a family comes in for a tour and their situation doesn't fit the template we're most used to, we try to slow down and actually listen instead of rushing to fit them into a box.

A Dementia Care Home should feel like it belongs to the person living there. Not the other way around. That's the standard we're working toward, and it's one I think is worth naming clearly, even when we're still figuring out how to meet it.