There is a shortage of both affordable student rooms and nursing staff. Elderly care organization Warande is trying to make one solution of these two problems in Zeist: a cheap room for nurses in the nursing home. ‘With music I now have to be considerate of my downstairs neighbours.’
At first glance, the new accommodation of student nurse Pascal Boonstra (22) does not seem to deviate from a normal student house. There is a bed, a sofa, a clothes rack, two professional studio speakers and an open bag of chips in the windowsill.
A look in the bathroom suggests otherwise: there is a folding chair in the shower cubicle and the holes in the tiles on either side of the toilet are reminiscent of the toilet brackets that Boonstra unscrewed from the wall yesterday. The cutlery drawers in the communal kitchen down the hall are locked with safety hooks.
Boonstra is the newest and by far the youngest resident of nursing home Heerewegen in Zeist in Utrecht, which is normally only inhabited by one hundred and twenty elderly people with memory problems. For a week now, the elderly care organization Warande has been offering the eighth and ninth floors of the complex as cheap accommodation for employees. The eighteen rooms on the two top floors, with a view of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, had been empty for a few years. By transforming the floors into ‘sister flat 2.0’, Warande is trying to combat the staff shortage with the housing shortage.
‘This is a win-win situation,’ says Wouter van Brenk, facility manager at Warande, as he watches how a handyman hangs up the mailboxes for the new residents. ‘In light of the housing crisis, it is difficult for us to leave our floors empty. Homes are certainly not cheap in this region.’ At the same time, the elderly care organization is struggling with staff shortages: there are currently forty vacancies for care functions, spread over the seven locations that the organization has. ‘In this way we hope to make the vacancies more attractive to healthcare workers, also from outside the region.’
Sign up lodgers
Everywhere in the Netherlands, elderly care is struggling with unprecedented price increases, according to a report last month from the sector organization for elderly care Actiz. The sector organization expects that the number of elderly care institutions that will end up in the red will double in the coming years, partly due to price increases for energy, food and other services. The largest cost increase occurs when hiring non-salaried personnel. Care organizations are forced to hire freelancers due to absenteeism, and because the demand for care for the elderly is growing faster than the supply.
The elderly care organization in Zeist decided to team up with property manager Gapph, which provides the rooms – two for each resident – on loan for a fee of 267 euros, a construction popularly known as anti-squatting. Part of the money goes to property manager Gapph, the rest goes to Warande as compensation for gas, water and electricity. In exchange for having cheap housing, Warande can terminate the contract with the residents with a notice period of four weeks.
‘Very fine for now,’ says Boonstra, who is training as a nurse one day a week and works the other days at a Warande branch in Houten. ‘I used to live with my parents and had been looking for an affordable place for myself for a long time, but because the queues at housing associations are so long, I didn’t qualify for anything. Now I have two rooms for really little money.’ He likes the fact that Boonstra doesn’t work in the same nursing home where he now lives. ‘That way I can keep work and private life a little bit separate.’
Because it remains a nursing home, no matter how hard Warande has done her best to make the rooms ready for living. ‘There are a few agreements that the residents must adhere to,’ says Jeroen van Vliet, regional manager of Gapph Vastgoedbeheer. For example, guests must be reported and cooking is only allowed in the shared kitchen. ‘We can’t have to evacuate all the elderly at night because someone on the ninth floor burns a sandwich in his room.’
Loud music
Pascal Boonstra can live with that. Only the rule that music should be quiet from ten o’clock in the evening, he sometimes accidentally exceeds. ‘I listen to music all day long, mainly rock from before the nineties. Jimi Hendrix’s records are currently on repeat. Preferably at full volume, but now that I live here I have to take my neighbors downstairs into account.’ So far things are going well, he says. “I haven’t heard any complaints yet.”
‘A creative solution,’ a spokesman for the Actiz trade association calls Warande’s attempt to reduce the staff shortage. ‘I’ve never seen this before. There are nursing homes that work with ‘open hiring’, where applicants are accepted after just one interview, or home care organizations that offer ‘mum and dad contracts’. Many services in the care sector start as early as seven in the morning. With a mom and dad contract, a parent can first take a child to school and then start quietly.’
Whether the ‘sister flat 2.0’ in Zeist will actually solve Warande’s staff shortage remains to be seen. Three interested parties have now signed a loan contract, including Boonstra. All three are healthcare workers who were already employed by Warande. Nevertheless, manager Van Brenk is not worried. ‘Registrations have only been open for a week and three people have already registered. Nurses from outside will surely follow soon.’