Positivity In The City For New Hawthorndale Care Village
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It has been a long time in the making, but work on the Hawthorndale Care Village is finally underway.
And in three months time tenders will go out for the civil, residential and commercial aspects of the build, which is expected to create 300 jobs for Invercargill, using multiple contractors.
The Hawthorndale Care Village Charitable Trust working group member Paddy O’Brien said it was great to see the soil being turned, and any doubters that didn’t think it would go ahead “can eat humble pie.”
The initial $6.5 million fundraising target has been met for the $35 million project, and all that was left was the final $2 million for contingency and insurance, he said. It would also go towards fit out of the 13 dementia care houses.
“The community has been outstanding. People can see the progress now.”
The contracts would be split into one for the villas for the more independent residents, one for the 13 care homes with six or seven people in each, and one for the care centre including a café and theatre.
Construction would start in May and was expected to take two years to complete, with an August 2025 planned opening.
Residents from Calvary Hospital, which would close when the village opened on the site of the former Hawthorndale school, would have the opportunity to transition to the new village, which would be staffed by the Calvary team.
Staff were already undergoing specialised training in dementia, and a partnership was underway in conjunction with the University of Otago and Southern Institute of Technology.
The village is an aged care facility inspired by the world-leading Dutch dementia village, De Hogeweyk. It will follow a social rather than a traditional institutional model of care, allowing residents to live as normal a life as possible, exercising choice over their daily lives.
Once open the facility will create 11 new jobs and retain 87 jobs from the Calvary Hospital transition.
Calvary Hospital manager Margaret Brown said she was thrilled that all the hard work was paying off.
“The village will be an asset to our community. It is an innovative approach to aged care and will have far greater outcomes for older people, especially people with dementia,” she said.