Apartments for Life in Australia Lessons for Australia from Humanitas in the Netherlands

The Humanitas Foundation in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, has attracted international renown because of its achievements in developing the innovative Apartments for Life model of housing and care for older people. Under the leadership of Dr Hans Becker, Chair of the Humanitas Foundation, the rst Apartments for Life complex opened in the mid 1990s. Today there are more than fteen Apartments for Life complexes in Rotterdam with several thousand older people as residents.As its name suggests, a key feature of the Apartments for Life model is that it offers older people a chance to remain in their own home – in this case an apartment– throughout older age and to avoid having to move home when their health declines and they require increasing levels of care and support. Apartments for Life challenges the oft-held assumption of the inevitability of a move to a nursing home in later old age.