Patient-centered care helps dementia patients cope

Mar 24, 2009 2:07 PM

We’d all like to think that, should we or our loved ones need care in an assisted living facility or nursing home, we’d still be treated as people, with care planned around our individual needs.

Sadly, in the case of people with dementia, that’s not always true. Traditional nursing home care tends to be “task driven,” with an emphasis on meeting basic physical needs for food, cleanliness, and medication. Inflexible routines can mean that people’s social and emotional needs, which vary from person to person, get ignored.

Not surprisingly, research is building that this isn’t the best way to treat people who are already confused and challenging to care for. A new study compares “usual” residential living care for people with dementia, with a model called “person-centered care.”

The report makes hard reading for anyone with elderly relatives in nursing home care. In the words of the researchers, many people with dementia spend long hours alone and emotionally distressed.

The study focused on signs of agitation among nursing home residents, including behavior such as screaming, hitting out, pacing about, and hiding things. The researchers found that this type of behavior decreased significantly when residents’ care was planned around their own preferences and needs.

It makes you wonder why all care isn’t planned in this way. It seems so obvious that treating people with respect, as individuals, is best. Yet research like this is important. It costs money to provide individually planned care. If a study can prove that person-centered care is cost effective by reducing the amount of challenging behavior the nursing home has to cope with, then it’s an important step in the right direction.

What you need to know. Care planned around the personal needs of a person with dementia means they are less likely to become upset and agitated. If you’re concerned about the care of an elderly relative, speak to the assisted living facility or nursing home manager and ask whether they practice person-centered care.

—Anna Sayburn, patient editor, BMJ Group

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