TIMES TaIlored ManagEment of Sleep: The clinical, social and cost effectiveness of a decision support tool to optimise community-based tailored management of sleep for people living with dementia or mild cognitive impairment and sleep disturbance
In the UK, there are 850,000 with dementia and 2.4 million people with mild cognitive impairment. Sleep problems are common in this population. Sleep disturbance affects daily living and can be difficult for carers to cope with. Many different things can upset sleep in people living with dementia / mild cognitive impairment. Medicines help some people, but sleep medicines used long-term can be harmful or stop working. Sleep management is a challenging issue to study because the problem is complex and help also needs to be tailored to the individual.
The TIMES project aims to develop and test a tool (TIMES) to help primary-care clinicians working with patients and their carers to improve sleep management. Community-based clinicians will be able to optimise the tailored care of their patients and sleep disorders, and their carers. The study will use co-design methods to ensure that carers are involved, and their voice and needs are considered. The intervention will be tested using a cluster RCT with internal pilot Evaluate costs and benefits from an NHS & Personal Social Services (PSS) perspective Methods.
Please contact Chris Fox for more information:
Email: chris.fox@uea.ac.uk
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Adapting and testing an intervention for carers of people with dementia – CAREcoach
Dementia affects about 850,000 people in the UK who are supported by around 700,000 family carers. Promising results have emerged from studies examining the potential of supportive e-health interventions developed in the Netherlands which have shown a reduction in Caregiver stress among people caring for relatives with dementia. Looking at the broader research evidence there has been a lack of methodological quality in previous research and there is a need for randomised controlled studies to provide robust evidence.
The CARECOACH programme has been developed to address these issues and will provide much needed evidence on the impact of a promising intervention which develops blended care (e-health and coaching) for carers of people with dementia. Preliminary work will establish how the intervention should be adapted for UK settings, the best implementation strategy and whether implementation is feasible in the UK leading towards the completion of a full clinical trial. Longer follow up will determine if carer well-being improves and is sustained. This is critical to all carer interventions in dementia and has yet to be achieved for programmes using on- line interventions.
Please contact Fiona Scheibl for more information:
Email: fiona.scheibl@uea.ac.uk