The number of elderly people moving into long-term care facilities is expected to increase as the population of people 65 and older continues to rise at a significantly high rate. Simultaneously, the number of people expected to be diagnosed with dementia will also increase unless a cure for this devastating disease is found. In the meantime, caregivers face many problems in providing healthy and humane treatments. One such problem that is a major concern for caregivers is controlling wandering behavior. This behavior often places patients in life threatening situations, and the current methods used by many facilities do not promote a high quality of life.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of various tape patterns on the wandering behaviors of residents living in a special dementia care unit in Heritage Hall Nursing Home, Blacksburg, Virginia. Similar studies revealed that alternative methods using tape patterns could reduce exiting attempts at a fire exit door or could possibly increase these attempts.
In order to address these inconsistencies, exiting attempts at a fire exit door were recorded during one baseline and two similar test conditions. It was found that exiting attempts was a serious problem in this unit as 40% of the residents attempted to exit the faci I ity during the study. The use of tape patterns reduced exiting attempts by 19.05% and 11.12%; however, this reduction was not statistically significant. In conclusion, the use of these tape patterns affected wandering behavior differently for each of the residents, suggesting that a multi-method approach for controlling exiting behavior may prove to be more successful when dealing with a heterogeneous sample and their multi-needs. / Master of Science
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/36239 |
| Date | 17 December 2008 |
| Creators | Hamilton, Claire L. |
| Contributors | Housing, Interior Design, and Resource Management, McLain-Kark, Joan H., Marshall-Baker, Anna, Travis, Shirley S. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | ix, 72 leaves, BTD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 28553209, LD5655.V855_1993.H363.pdf |
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