A study on effect of media therapy for the elderly with dementia to nursing care quality

Abstract

Japanese society contains an extremely large elderly population, unprecedented elsewhere in the world. In fact, the elderly make up about 23.3% of the Japanese population. Consequently, the number of elderly people with dementia is also increasing at an unexpectedly rapid pace, with 10% of Japanese citizens over 65 diagnosed with dementia. While group homes are covered by the Japanese "Long-term Care Insurance System," and offer people with dementia a better quality of life, the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia, (BPSD,) often place a great burden on care staff. Many facilities now suffer from a shortage of care staff .Drug therapies have limited effects on BPSD, so non-pharmacological therapies, like reminiscence therapy, are sometimes used. However, the effects of these techniques are often not medically confirmed. In this study, we introduce a media therapy technique, which enhances reminiscence therapy by using media and information technologies, and report promising results for mitigating BPSD. Also, we investigate the keys to our success. So far, we have conducted our proposed media therapy on two residents in the nursing home. Both cases showed significant improvements, but due to space limitations, we only show the effects on the ability of the care staff to see to the patient's needs. The therapy session allowed care staff to distract the patient from her BPSD and calm her down by offering her topics from her past. For further investigation, we analyzed videos recorded during therapy sessions, with interesting results. Sharing a resident's good memories with care staff is key to quality care, and media and information technologies can facilitate this process. While we only examine one case here, we would like to note that the results of our other resident case indicated similar effects. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.