Feasibility RCT of Empowered Conversations dementia carer training
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Evaluation of the feasibility of a RCT of Empowered Conversations: a training to enhance relationships and communication between family carers and people living with dementia
IRAS ID
301042
Contact name
Lydia Morris
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The University of Manchester
ISRCTN Number
ISRCTN15261686
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 7 months, 30 days
Research summary
There are 700,000 family and informal carers for people living with dementia in the UK alone. Sixty-four percent of informal carers in England say they have limited support for the range of psychological and social needs they experience. It can be difficult to keep communicating well due to thinking and memory changes that arise when someone is living with dementia. This can lead to frustration, low-mood and stress for both people living with dementia and their carers.
The 6-session online Empowered Conversations course is designed to enable carers to establish and maintain good communication and relationships with those they support. Course facilitators are trained to provide specific communication techniques, ways of managing conflicts and working with difficult emotions.
The course has been tried out over the last 4-years and changes made. Feedback from informal carers indicates it is in an optimum form and we are ready to test it further in a large trial. Before we do this, we need to do a smaller ‘feasibility’ trial to check whether such a larger trial is possible. This is important because a big trial will help us identify if our course works, but trials are expensive and unhelpful if they go wrong. Our ‘feasibility’ trial will check several things. We want to make sure that carers would be willing to have an only 66% chance of receiving the course straight away, because it is essential to have a comparison group. The remaining 33% of carers would be offered the course 6-months later. We want to ensure that our design is good enough to identify any improvement in carers’ well-being, relationships and communication. We will also ask carers to take part in a one-to-one interview about their experiences of the course. This is a Greater Manchester study; funded by National Institute for Health Research.
REC name
Wales REC 2
REC reference
22/WA/0010
Date of REC Opinion
23 Feb 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion