Waking coma/rehab phase F
Waking coma/rehab phase F
Six care places for people in persistent vegetative state
As the only facility in the Olpe district, our GFO Center Living & Care Franziskaner-Hof offers care places for people in a vegetative state (rehab phase F).
The six single rooms of the coma vigil area in the building part Altes Kloster are located on one level. A recreation room, the nursing and therapy bathroom and the nurses' station are attached.
Therapeutic units for people in persistent vegetative state are to be set up in the rooms, but also in various other premises. Extensive therapeutic-rehabilitative aids are available. This makes it possible to react individually to the most varied requirements of the vegetative state patients.
In addition to the services of the social service, the following nursing and therapeutic offers are available for coma patients:
- Speech therapy
- basal stimulation
- Physiotherapy
- Snouzelen
- Therapeutic care according to Bobath
- Excerpts from sound therapy
- Excerpts from aromatherapy
We build bridges into the social life for patients with coma
The use of the term "vegetative state" is neither unambiguous nor uncontroversial. Even if the affected group of people is increasingly described in the literature as residents of neurological phase F, the term "vegetative state" in our view most closely reflects the attitude that we represent: that the condition of the affected person is a possibly temporary one, in which the residents in a vegetative state can still perceive and feel many things.
From reports of formerly affected people in a vegetative state and based on the latest medical research, we know, for example, that impressions from the environment are also taken in during a vegetative state, even if they are not processed and reacted to in a form recognizable to the environment.
Our attitude towards coma patients also reflects a fundamental question of ethical and Christian responsibility - towards the fellow human beings in coma, who remain fellow human beings even if they can no longer participate in life in the usual way.
We are the contact point for the field of vegetative state in the region. We subscribe to the newer relational medical approach, which describes people in a vegetative state not as deficient, but as different.
It is important to recognize this difference with its possibilities and, based on this, to offer the affected people in a vegetative state as "complete" a life as possible and thus to ensure the participation of people in a vegetative state in social life even when severe and most serious consequences of neurological diseases narrow the "bridges" to the environment or interrupt them completely at times.
In our opinion, only this can be reconciled with Article l of the Basic Law "The dignity of the human being is inviolable" as well as with our guiding principles, which we have formulated in the GFO Center Living, Care & Waking Coma Franziskaner-Hof as the basis of our work.