Dementia

Background The majority of patients with Alzheimer's disease live outside institutions and there is considerable serious psychological morbidity among their carers.

Aims To evaluate whether family intervention reduces the subjective burden of care in carers of patients with Alzheimer's disease and produces clinical benefits in the patients.

Policy guidelines insist that people with dementia should be involved in decisions about key life choices and transitions. However, as dementia affects both cognitive and communication difficulties, it becomes increasingly difficult to do this, and innovative and effective ways to support people with dementia and their carers to interact with each other are needed. This project, funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, examined if Talking Mats, a low-tech communication framework, could support family carers and people with dementia to discuss issues around daily living with each other.

This article describes the themes emerging from the author’s anthology of personal accounts of caring for a family member or friend with dementia, ‘Telling tales about dementia’. It explains the importance of family carers and suggests that the knowledge of family carers should be actively sought by professionals delivering services, discussing the barriers of patient confidentiality, examples of important information from family carers being disregarded, and the role of family carers in monitoring care and challenging professionals when necessary.

This paper critically examines the trend within dementia care to focus either on people with dementia or their informal carer. Attention is given to the alliances and collusions that may develop within triads comprising people with dementia, their carers and dementia care practitioners and the implications for this upon the distribution of power. The paper outlines an inclusive model of dementia care in which the needs of the person with dementia, family carers and the dementia care practitioner are understood in terms of inclusion.

Family caregiving is attracting more attention from policy makers and service providers, but managing a chronic condition in the home is a very complex activity that usually remains invisible to health care professionals. The study's purpose was to identify strategies family caregivers used in the home to care for their relatives who have dementia. The author collected data from interviews with 18 caregivers and two health care professionals, and from participant observation in caregivers' support groups and homes.

The authors studied a group of older carers of aging adults with Down syndrome (DS) to ascertain what effects such caregiving may have on them given the presence or possibility of age-associated decline or dementia. The study also examined the comparative levels of care provided, key signs noted when decline was beginning, the subjective burden experienced, and what were the key associated health factors when carers faced a changed level of care.

Hampshire: Alzheimer Cafe UK – a new approach to support for people with dementia and their carers – has been launched in Hampshire. Kandy Redwood explains.

Objective. To examine the possible association between satisfaction with nursing support and the risk of caregiver strain in informal carers in four Basic Health Areas in Barcelona from 2001 to 2002. Method. An observational, descriptive, cross-sectional study was performed. Subjects were 65 informal carers of both sexes of individuals aged 65 years or older with chronic or terminal diseases, or dementia. Carer-related variables were: age, gender, family relationship with the patient, degree of burden, risk of abandonment, and satisfaction with nursing support.

Background A third of family carers of people with dementia report abusive behaviour towards the person for whom they are caring.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine relatives’ perception of an assistive technology intervention aimed at persons with dementia (PwDs) and their relatives, and to examine whether, and how, experiences of the intervention process differed between relatives valuing the intervention to be of high, and relatives perceiving it to be of low significance. Method: A total of 47 relatives of PwDs within the Swedish Technology and Dementia project were interviewed telephonically using a modified version of the Patient perspective on Care and Rehabilitation process instrum