A social area inside Centre Pontalize, a care home for the elderly in Ettelbruck Centre Pontalize

A social area inside Centre Pontalize, a care home for the elderly in Ettelbruck Centre Pontalize

Centre Pontalize houses 145 elderly people in a leafy campus in Ettelbruck. The care home was designed in 2007 to offer residents a high quality of life, ensuring the balance of autonomy and care that residents wanted. So, when the pandemic was declared in March and Feith and his team had to close their doors to the public, it was hard to swallow.

“In March suddenly someone says now we’re closing the doors and you cut all contact with the families. It’s terrible for the residents and families,” said Feith. From that moment, the centre withdrew into its own bubble, offering more activities for residents to help combat anxiety and isolation.

Photo shows the visitor room at the care home. Photo: Centre Pontalize

Managing visits

“What’s interesting in our building is we have a lot of space which means residents can always move around,” the director said, stressing that besides cutting contact with the outside, life inside remained unchanged. Feith says that residents, many of which had lived through the second world war, generally accepted the restrictions in March and again in October, when 12 residents became infected by coronavirus.

Families were not always so understanding. It remains a sore spot for some that visits are now limited to 30-minute slots to be made by appointment only, in a less intimate visiting room with plexi-glass screens.

Science and data have shown that the risk of developing severe illness from covid-19 increases with age. In the US, by December eight out of ten covid-19 deaths were among adults aged 65 and over according to the Center for Disease Control. In Europe, the over 60s make up more than nine in ten of the continent’s fatalities since August this year.

On-site diagnoses

Until vaccines are rolled out to staff and residents of care homes, preventing exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a daily preoccupation of Feith and his team and it has resulted in improvements at the facility. At the start of the pandemic, residents with covid-19 symptoms outside of business hours had to be taken to a Maison Medicale, an emergency out-of-hours medical service, or hospital.

Jean Feith, pictured, is hospitality and hosting director at public care home Centre Pontalize. Photo: Centre Pontalize

Today, the centre benefits from an on-call GP available 24/7. “We’re rarely obliged to send a person who has symptoms, if not serious, to hospital,” Feith said. He believes this is why there are so few people in ICU in the country’s four main hospitals, compared to the start of the pandemic. “I think one of the reasons is that care homes send fewer people to hospital.”

Lessons learned

The director expects this service to continue after the pandemic as well as improved access to an on-site psychologist, whose weekly hours were doubled from 10 to 20 this year to benefit residents and staff.

For Feith, who retires in January, the big lesson learned in 2020 has been the importance of communication. “Communicating why you take the decision you do, what was the thought process behind that?” he said. “I believe we were lucky that since the start, we had doctors and hygienists on site who we could consult with.”