LivDem-Families
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Supporting Families to Adjust to a Diagnosis of Dementia: a preliminary study to adapt the LivDem intervention.
IRAS ID
344253
Contact name
Richard Cheston
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of the West of England
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 10 days
Research summary
The LivDem post-diagnostic course helps people to adjust to dementia. It consists of eight, weekly sessions that only the person with dementia attends. It is widely used across the UK and also in Europe. However, there are two problems with LivDem: first not everyone wants or is able to attend a group, and secondly many families would also benefit from being involved. We therefore want to adapt LivDem so that we can use it with couples or families. After consulting with different groups of stakeholders and surveying existing LivDem facilitators we developed an intervention – this is LivDem-Families and it consists of four sessions. Natasha Woodstoke (an experienced Clinical Psychologist) used this new intervention with four families. All of the families, including the person living with dementia, told us that they thought it had been helpful.
We now want to move onto the next stage of the research. This involves training people who work with people living with dementia, but who would not normally provide a clinical intervention such as LivDem-Families. The health care workers that we will train are three Research Psychologists at the RICE centre in Bath. Each of these people will deliver LivDem-Families to either two or three couples or families. They will take measures of mood, relationship quality and caregiver stress before and after the intervention. Our team will meet the participants once they have finished the intervention to find out how it has gone for them.
We will use the information we get from this research to improve both the training that we provide and also the LivDem-Families intervention itself. If the results are promising, then we will go onto carry out a larger study, possibly a randomised control trial.
REC name
Wales REC 7
REC reference
24/WA/0186
Date of REC Opinion
24 Jun 2024
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion