Using Technology to Mitigate the Impact of Social Isolation on People with Dementia in Long Term Care Homes: A Protocol

Who & What

Long-term care homes (LTCH) in Canada have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 outbreaks. Most importantly, 70% of the residents in these care homes have a dementia diagnosis. This puts a lot of burden on LTCH staff since they have to maintain their standard of care, follow infection control measures, and ensure residents are not being affected physically nor mentally. The Dementia Isolation Toolkit (DIT)-Tech prototype poses as a solution consisting of tablet with applications for video-calling and leisure activities such as gaming. The DIT is currently being implemented in a LTCH to study how it helps mitigate the impact of social isolation on people with dementia.

How

The DIT-Tech prototype is a plan-do-study-act (PDSA) Quality Improvement (QI) project. It’s similar to implementation science and works towards making improvements to a specific problem in the healthcare system such as isolation care in LTCH. This QI project is a mixed methods study that will identify barriers and facilitators to implementing the DIT-Tech prototype for residents in isolation care. Tablets will be distributed in a LTCH and monitored to collect usage statistics for quantitative data. Qualitative data will be collected through interviews with the LTCH staff, residents, and family members of the residents. Interviews will occur pre-, during, and post- implementation to obtain feedback on barriers, engagement, time, and usability.

Importance

By evaluating the data gathered during the implementation phase using a thematic analysis approach, we will be able to identify common themes such as barriers or facilitators to the implementation of technology in LTCHs. This is the first PDSA cycle of the DIT-Tech prototype and results analyzed from this study will be used to make improvements to the technology for future distributions of the tablets on a wider scale.