Psychosocial intervention programmes in dementia

Global aging leads to an increasing number of people with dementia. Neuropsychiatric symptoms are behavioural and psychological disturbances that are highly prevalent (80-90%) in people with dementia. Neuropsychiatric symptoms can lead to worse patient outcomes, such as lower quality of life, morbidity and mortality, and greater caregiver distress. Because of the adverse effects often associated with pharmacological treatment, international dementia care guidelines recommend psychosocial multicomponent interventions as the first-line treatment. Neuropsychiatric symptoms often express diverse underlying causes, including pain and discomfort. Therefore, multidisciplinary teamwork is key to identifying and addressing the causes.

We have developed and implemented psychosocial intervention programmes for neuropsychiatric symptoms based on a convergent framework; namely, The Swedish Registry for Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia in Sweden (BPSD-registret), DEMBASE in Japan, and the STIP-Method in the Netherlands. Our programmes consist of a training course and a web-based tool designed to facilitate multidisciplinary discussion by sharing information and visualizing changes in existing neuropsychiatric symptoms. Given the proven effectiveness across the diverse cultural contexts and health systems, our international consortium offers a sustainable care model that can be adapted to ageing societies worldwide through successful three-country collaboration.

This Lorentz workshop aims to establish an international alliance of proven, effective psychosocial multicomponent intervention programmes for neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia. The alliance will focus on future scientific publications utilising cross-country data and serve as a global hub for other researchers interested in introducing the programme into their countries.

This workshop and its subsequent outputs will shed light on cultural diversities in psychosocial needs of people with dementia, as well as the universal structure of the programmes that help providers tailor their interventions to individual needs. Furthermore, the workshop will explore broader international networking with Dutch early career researchers working on other psychosocial intervention programmes for people with dementia.

Topics

• Exchange: to build a shared understanding of the three programmes, BPSD-registret, DEMBASE, and STIP-Method
• Discussion: to achieve a consensus framework for a data repository that automatically integrates and stores data in a comparative manner
• Networking: to share an overview of the characteristics of psychosocial interventions for people with dementia and discuss potential future work aimed at obtaining an integrated view of their effectiveness