MARQUE: Improving agitation in people with dementia in care homes

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Managing Agitation and Raising QUality of Life: Cluster RCT to decrease symptoms of agitation in people with dementia in care homes

• IRAS ID

  151423

• Contact name

  Gill Livingston

• Contact email

  g.livingston@ucl.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  UCL

• Research summary

  More than half of people with dementia living in care homes experience symptoms of agitation every month. These symptoms are associated with lower quality of life and higher care costs; increasing the cost of care for a person with dementia by around £30000 a year compared to a person with dementia without agitation symptoms.
  We aim develop a manual for delivering and implementing an intervention for agitation based on variety of sources, including: our previous manual based coping strategy programme, our systematic review of effective measures for improving agitation qualitative interviews with staff; and information from our longitudinal study.
  As part of this study, we will interview staff and managers in care homes about enablers and barriers to interventions. We will use these for manual development and then test the manual for acceptability, clarity and practicality; modifying it in response to feedback.

  We will then in a pragmatic randomised controlled trial (RCT) evaluate the manual. We aim to train paid carers, train champions for the intervention, provide ongoing supervision, produce an implementation guide and transfer research findings about managing agitation in people with dementia living in care homes into everyday practice throughout the UK care home system. This study main aim is to estimate the clinical and cost effectiveness of changing care homes’ culture to incorporate evidence based strategies in routine care to improve agitation. This RCT will examine the hypothesis that working with staff to integrate interventions in care homes will reduce emergent agitation and manage existing agitation, as measured by the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory over an 8 month implementation period, and that this will raise quality of life compared to usual care and be cost effective. We will also explore the effect on care staff. If benefits are demonstrated this package could be implemented throughout the care home system.

• REC name

  London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  14/LO/0697

• Date of REC Opinion

  2 Jun 2014

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion