Making Person-Centred Health Care Beneficial for People with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or Mild Dementia – Results of Interviews with Patients and Their Informal Caregivers

Abstract

In the health care sector, person-centred treatment approaches have shown the potential to improve treatment outcomes and quality of life of patients. In particular, this applies where patients are living with complex conditions like multimorbid older patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or mild dementia. Such treatment approaches quite often include input from modern health technologies like health/home monitoring platforms which also offer services to patients for self-management of their conditions. This approach is also followed in the research project CAREPATH (An Integrated Solution for Sustainable Care for Multimorbid Patients with Dementia). To achieve acceptance of such complex health technologies, their services must be beneficial in the eyes of target end users which included in the case of CAREPATH, the patient’s informal caregivers. Therefore, understanding the user requirements of patients and their informal caregivers is of utmost importance which was achieved in CAREPATH by interviews. These revealed that patients’ preferences in regard to what services and information shall be provided to them shall be limited to what they deem necessary which is highly personal. Informal caregivers as opposed to patients, are much interested in receiving most possible information about their care-dependent’s health status. Thus, provision of services and information for these user groups need to be highly customizable to their personal preferences and needs.