Life story project for person with dementia and their spouse

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25671009
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Gerontological nursing
• Research Institution: Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital and Institute of Gerontology
• Principal Investigator: Ito Mio 地方独立行政法人東京都健康長寿医療センター(東京都健康長寿医療センター研究所), 東京都健康長寿医療センター研究所, 研究員 (20450562)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 認知症ケア / 介護家族 / ライフストーリー / 夫婦

Outline of Final Research Achievements

A quarter of the family caregivers are spouses in Japan. Spouse caregivers face their own aging and diseases, and also take care of people with dementia. Thus they concentrate to the difficulty of this moment and are susceptible to burnout. So we expected if couples join the life story project, their difficulty will be reduced. They have the opportunity to look back over their life and their awareness expands from past to future. Depression and care difficulty was improved significantly after 4-5 session of the couple’s life story project. But there was no result to show improvement of relationships from this research. This project is recommended to couples to improve spouse caregivers depression and care difficulty.

Free Research Field

老年看護