The research shows that by Non-Pharmacological Intervention, the problem behaviors and mental symptoms of the elders who have Dementia can be improved, and their cognitive abilities, too. We provide the comfort for the elders and caregivers initiatively and build the environment which is friendly and qualified for caring.
The Non-Pharmacological Interventions for Dementia (Pet therapy) is promoted in long-term care institution of Taoyuan City in 2016. To explore the changes of the elders with Dementia before and after the Non-Pharmacological Intervention, Motor Inventory, Expression Inventory, and Emotion Inventory are designed to evaluate the effectiveness. Through the comparison before and after the tests, the evaluation of Motor Inventory shows the improvement of the elders with Dementia for19.05% compared with results before intervention on indicators of movement application, attention and concentration, and praxis ability. It shows on the evaluation of Expression Inventory, the performance of elders with Dementia improves 15.5% compared to the results before invention on indicators of passively meaningful oral/physical response and questions, appropriate volume/clear physical expression, the degree of completeness of words, able to have conversation with 2 times or more questions and answers, able to speak out complete thoughts toward specific problems, able to comment or praise other’s problems or performances, able to respond appropriately toward comment or praises from others. Through the evaluation of Emotion Inventory shows that the performance of the elders with Dementia improves obviously for 118.98% compared to the results before invention on indicators of feel peaceful and relaxed during the interaction between people and /dog, participate in the interaction with people/ dog and feel happy, joyful, and satisfied/ distinguish personal emotion (each one for positive and negative emotion). Combining the conclusions above, it shows that after the intervention of therapy dog helps to improve elders with Dementia on motor, emotion, and expression, especially effects residents in institution positively on emotion.
We continue to go through Pet therapy in 2017, and promote diversified Non-Pharmacological Interventions which include the lesson of Aromatherapy, Horticultural therapy, Music therapy, etc. and popularize the service to communities, enhance the accessibility for patients with Dementia to accept Non-Pharmacological interventions for Dementia and get to the goal of ageing in place.
