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Our Community The Safe-Home Programme Ireland
Contact Details
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Our Community The Safe-Home Programme Ireland
Contact Details
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Developed
by Webtrade Ltd.
© 2000-2001 Webtrade Communications Ltd.
Set up in January 2000 the Safe-Home programme has been operating on a national basis ever since. Prior to the set-up a number of people from Britain and the USA had been repatriated to St Brendan's Village in Mulranny following the publicity that surrounded the opening of the St Brendan's Village complex for elderly people. This project, the dream child of Safe-Home Founder, and local GP, Dr Jerry Cowley, offered a continuum of care to local elderly people. He argued that the practice of 'spiriting away' elderly people who could no longer manage living alone in isolated rural areas and placing them in geriatric wards or the county home sapped their spirit and lead to their premature death. He argued that there was a need to separate old age from illness, that those of his patients no longer able to manage alone in isolated rural areas were not ill, they were old. They did not need hospitalisation - instead they needed contact with their peers, in the first instance and, for some, re-housing in a more sheltered environment.
