Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21940
Appears in Collections:Faculty of Social Sciences Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: Evidence of what works to support and sustain care at home for people with dementia: A literature review with a systematic approach
Author(s): Dawson, Alison
Bowes, Alison
Kelly, Fiona
Velzke, Kari
Ward, Richard
Contact Email: a.s.f.dawson@stir.ac.uk
Keywords: Dementia
Care at home
Services
Support
Issue Date: 13-May-2015
Date Deposited: 3-Jul-2015
Citation: Dawson A, Bowes A, Kelly F, Velzke K & Ward R (2015) Evidence of what works to support and sustain care at home for people with dementia: A literature review with a systematic approach. BMC Geriatrics, 15 (1), Art. No.: 59. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-015-0053-9
Abstract: Background: This paper synthesises research evidence about the effectiveness of services intended to support and sustain people with dementia to live at home, including supporting carers. The review was commissioned to support an inspection regime and identifies the current state of scientific knowledge regarding appropriate and effective services in relation to a set of key outcomes derived from Scottish policy, inspection practice and standards. However, emphases on care at home and reduction in the use of institutional long term care are common to many international policy contexts and welfare regimes. Methods: Systematic searches of relevant electronic bibliographic databases crossing medical, psychological and social scientific literatures (CINAHL, IngentaConnect, Medline, ProQuest, PsychINFO and Web of Science) in November 2012 were followed by structured review and full-text evaluation processes, the latter using methodology-appropriate quality assessment criteria drawing on established protocols. Results: Of 131 publications evaluated, 56 were assessed to be of ‘high' quality, 62 of ‘medium' quality and 13 of ‘low' quality. Evaluations identified weaknesses in many published accounts of research, including lack of methodological detail and failure to evidence conclusions. Thematic analysis revealed multiple gaps in the evidence base, including in relation to take-up and use of self-directed support by people with dementia, use of rapid response teams and other multidisciplinary approaches, use of technology to support community-dwelling people with dementia, and support for people without access to unpaid or informal support. Conclusions: In many areas, policy and practice developments are proceeding on a limited evidence base. Key issues affecting substantial numbers of existing studies include: poorly designed and overly narrowly focused studies; variability and uncertainty in outcome measurement; lack of focus on the perspectives of people with dementia and supporters; and failure to understanding the complexities of living with dementia, and of the kinds of multifactorial interventions needed to provide holistic and effective support. Weaknesses in the evidence base present challenges both to practitioners looking for guidance on how best to design and deliver evidence-based services to support people living with dementia in the community and their carers and to those charged with the inspection of services.
DOI Link: 10.1186/s12877-015-0053-9
Rights: © 2015 Dawson et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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