By Amit Vaidya, Director- The Golden Estate

The thought of erstwhile retirement homes invokes images of olden time charitable institutions. The need of the hour is to provide our seniors a solution to live their Golden Years with pride and dignity.  A peep into The Golden Estate would change this perception to images of aging in place with care and self-esteem. The facility is designed to cater to independent living, assisted living and as well as palliative care. It’s an environment where our seniors lead a carefree and content life with no responsibilities.

The Golden Estate is a dream project of UCC Care Pvt Ltd that epitomizes luxurious community lifestyle for senior citizens. The Changing lifestyles, shortage of living space and a growing security concern for our elderly in urban areas motivated us to study the retirement lifestyle options available at present. While ideating the concept of The Golden Estate, we have drawn inspiration from our traditional Indian ‘Joint Family’ system. The blueprint of this community has been designed with a limited number of independent units, where all residents and team members are a one big family – the younger generation taking care of the elderly, with the love and respect that they deserve. At ’The Golden Estate we feel that there is a vital need to create homes for senior citizens that would provide an alternative lifestyle where they can live with dignity, enjoy an active social life and most importantly, feel safe and secure”

The primary factors which impact the decision of seniors to move to such “Senior Living Societies” is the desire for stress free living, physiological & psychological support, physical Security, medical support and most importantly life style. Our facility also provides a logistic solution for elders whose children are settled overseas, they are able to travel/ visit them at their convenience & ease.

The residents are provided a high quality of life where all their day to day chores and requirements are efficiently managed by our professional staff.  The senior citizens are constructively and actively engaged with peers in various activities and events. The prime years of post-retirement life should be spent enjoying rather than worrying about managing & running households. The close knit facility ensures that they are able to form ties and emotional connects with people from similar back grounds and are mentally stimulated at all times. The thoughts of being lonely and bored should never cross their minds.

At Golden Estate special care and personal touch is added to every minute detail, the entire week activities are  planned in a way that there is something new and exciting every day we engage our residents in  mentally stimulating games, religious engagement , movies, ‘gup shup’ sessions, meditation, indoor games, croquet, golf putting etc. We believe “life is a celebration” hence all the festivals, anniversaries, birthdays are rejoiced with full vigor and even days like ‘Valentines day’ are celebrated with a special event.

With age our seniors tend to become dependent on their grown up children and close family members for their day to day needs. Role reversals & work /family management stress at times causes a lot of tension within families & damages relationships. So with this concept younger family members are liberated from the role of full-time caregivers and older ones are free from a ‘baggage’ tag that tends to comes with this age.

We see children visiting their parents quite often at our premises and spending more meaningful and quality time with them.

We endorse that this set up is a win-win situation for both the parties. Children or the immediate family are content with the fact that their elder’s  are enjoying  a good quality life which they richly deserve and elders have the satisfaction of leading an independent life with dignity on their own terms.

(Amit Vaidya is the Director at The Golden Estate)