"The new group care program incorporated reminiscence into daily activities for dementia" was started for older persons with dementia who participated in a community rehabilitation program. The purpose of this study is to clarify the phenomenon occurred and the process brought out their hidden abilities by dementia in this new program. The participants of the program, consisted of eight sessions and once a week, were five elderly with mild to moderate dementia. The data were collected by video tape recording of the sessions and analyzed by a qualitative and inductive method. It was found that they had experienced their individual "starting points" in each session. Then, the some abilities were discovered as follows; sensing a wider range of time stream such as the past, the present and the future, asking themselves from both feelings of nothingness and achievement, interacting variously with other people such as the person not be in the place. From the results mentioned above, it is that the planning and practicing of a group care program according to daily life is very important to bring out the hidden abilities of elderly with dementia.

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The purpose of this study is to identify "improvable feeding difficulties" for the institutionalized elderly with dementia and to explore effect on arranging the environment. The subjects were 16 demented elderly with feeding difficulties. The intervention and non-intervention groups were matched by the severity of feeding difficulties, sex, and age. The six-month prospective intervention study was based on re-arranging the environment. Self-feeding was increased in the intervention group, from 30.7 % to 66.8% with severe feeding difficulties and from 97.0% to 98.9% with moderate feeding difficulties at the initial and final evaluations, respectively. Subjects with more severe feeding difficulties were found to be more readily affected by excessive environmental stimuli. Conversely, their self-feeding behaviors were more sensitive to the arrangement of their environment. Effective interventions to improve feeding difficulties included, (a) enhancing subjects' self-care agency, (b) arrangement of the physical and social environmental factors. Interventions creating suitable modifications of the environment dose enhance self-feeding behaviors in institutionalized elderly patients with dementia, thus contributing to their quality of life.

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The purpose of the present study was to investigate how caregiving tasks structure the lived-time experience of family caregivers of persons with dementia. Caregivers (n = 123) were recruited from the Alzheimer's Association Japan in October 1999. They were asked to keep a daily log of their caregiving activities for one week. From the total sample, 23 daily logs were selected and will be reported here. These logs comprise a total of 129 caregiving days and 1,586 total caregiving events. Content analysis identified 8 main categories of caregiving events : 1. ADL assistance ; 2. Medical management (medications and so on) ; 3. Social interaction and communication ; 4. Giving instructions and monitoring ; 5. Coping with problem behavior ; 6. Housekeeping ; 7. Going out for a walk or other activities ; 8. All others. The average daily caregiving time was 351 minutes(s.d. 215). Findings indicate that the highest frequency of caregiving occurred between the hours of 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. (18.1 % of all log entries). In a typical day, ADL assistance was the most frequent type of caregiving event(71.5%). In terms of simultaneity of tasks, dressing assistance often occurred with Giving instruction and monitoring. This also overlapped with Social interaction. Findings indicate that caregiving is a complex temporal event with caregivers typically performing multiple tasks at the same time. Better measures are needed to understand both the nature of caregiving time and its effect on caregiver's physical and mental health status.

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The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between recognition of and emotion towards sexuality regarding elderly with chronic illness, and nursing practice intention regarding sexuality. The cross-sectional, correctional research design was selected, data were consisted of the Nurses' Recognition of Older Adult Sexuality Questionnaire (NROSQ) , Nurses' Emotion of Older Adult Sexuality Questionnaire (NEOSQ) and Nurses' Practice Intention for Older Adults Sexuality Questionnaire (NPIOSQ). The subjects were 539 nurses caring for elderly in the hospitals. The average of their ages was 33.5 years (SD = 9.2). Multiple regression analysis indicated that sexual identity, stereotype for sexual image, loss of sexual role, taboos surrounding sexuality, acceptance for sexuality, and experience of education relating sexuality accounted for 32 % of the variance in positive intention to practice. The implications of the study suggest the need for an improvement in nursing education and nurse continuing education regarding sexuality and the impact of the aging process on sexuality.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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