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A naturalistic two-year cohort study of agitation and quality of life in care homes
Led by Dr. Claudia Cooper
What is Stream 2?
Stream 2 is a naturalistic study taking part in care homes across England exploring agitation and the quality of life of people with dementia.
Agitation is often a key symptom of those with dementia (of which over a third of the population over 65 suffer from). And as symptoms of agitation include restlessness, pacing, shouting and verbal or physical aggression, many people with agitation are admitted to care homes as families find they cannot care for them at home. Within the care home, staff also often find managing people with agitation difficult. Agitated behaviour takes up staff time and emotional and physical energy but they do not always know how to respond.
There are currently no existing datasets for people with dementia living in care homes that include data on residents, paid carers, family carers and cost including cost and environmental characteristics. These are urgently needed to develop an understanding of their inter-relatedness and effect on people with dementia's quality of life.
A home participating with MARQUE involves talking to residents, relatives and staff about the resident's quality of life and any symptoms of agitation they may experience. This is done on five occasions over 16 months. Staff also have the opportunity to complete a brief set of questionnaires looking at the ways they cope with caring stresses. We will use our results to test our theory that agitation is an important factor in determining residents' quality of life, and that the ways staff cope with stress affect the impact that agitation has on quality of life. Findings from Stream 2 will be used to develop a manualised intervention which will be tested in a randomised controlled trial in several care homes.
How's it going?
We recruited 97 care homes across the UK.
That means over 1400 residents in care homes, over 1000 relatives and 1600 staff members are taking part in the study.
We have completed all stages of the study.
Information for participants
Recruitment has now closed for this stream. However, if you or your relative is currently participating in MARQUE stream 2, you can download the information sheets here: Information Sheets for Stream 2
