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Living Well, Longer

Anxiety in Aged Care

This project team has developed a nursing observational tool to detect anxiety of people with dementia. This will enable nursing staff to determine whether a collection of behaviours by people with dementia is related to anxiety.

Dementia is becoming a focus of global challenges giving the ageing population. People with dementia regularly experience anxiety and managing anxiety experienced by these people is a constant challenge for residential aged care homes. This project team has developed a nursing observational tool to detect anxiety of people with dementia. This will enable nursing staff to determine whether a collection of behaviours by people with dementia is related to anxiety. It will also inform practices for anxiety management through improved interaction between nursing staff and people with dementia.

The team has developed a strong and close partnership with the aged care organisation Uniting which provides services to 14,000 older people across New South Wales and ACT. With 76 residential aged care homes, Uniting supported this project by providing access to research participants i.e. dementia care experts. The outcome of this project is useful for Uniting to provide better care for older people with dementia.

Future project plan includes completion of the two other research components:

  • Investigating the anxiety in caregivers of care recipients with dementia
  • Investigating and understanding the interaction between caregivers and care recipients

To complete these two components, field observations will be conducted in partnership with Uniting. We will continue to collaborate with Uniting to conduct high quality research and produce tangible outcomes that contribute to both theory and practice.

 

Publications

V. Traynor, S. Stephen, E. Barkus, H. Pavlik, P. Yu, S. Qian, N. Carrigan & M. Li (2016). Developing a Person Centered Fear and Dementia (FaDe) assessment tool for individuals living with a dementia. Presented at PCE 2016: 12th World Association for Person Centered & Experiential Psychotherapy & Counseling conference, New York, USA, 20‐24 July.

 

The team 

  • Associate Professor Ping Yu, as the Project Leader
  • Associate Professor Victoria Traynor 
  • Dr. Emma Barkus 
  • Dr. Mengxiang Li 
  • Dr. Siyu Qian
  • Ms. Susan Stephen 
  • Ms. Nicole Carrigan 
  • Ms. Helen Pavlik 
  • Ms. Michelle Flood 
  • Ms. Sarah Cope