Isabeau
They are often left aside, the forgottens. The media treatment of the Coronavirus is the perfect example: nursing home residents were the last to be counted in the French balance sheets. And yet ...
For many elderly, entering a retirement home is not always easy to accept and can be unsettling. The work of healthcare staff is therefore essential, especially in extreme situation such as a pandemic. Their goal: to place the other at the center of everything and help them to regain dignity and feel alive. Through very simple things that have become essential, as banal as bringing a cup of coffee. More than ever, their words, their gestures, their looks, have become vital in filling a great gap.
In order to better understand this situation and what the elderly were experiencing in this very peculiar time, I decided at the end of April 2020 to spend a week in immersion at the Isabeau residence, a medical nursing home in Roubaix, North of France that welcomes more than 120 residents.
This work has been awarded with the SAIF 2020 “Les Femmes s'exposent” PRIZE.
