Wide Awake Club study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Impact of night-time activities on the well-being of staff and residents with a diagnosis of dementia living in a care home- Wide Awake Club Study.
IRAS ID
226672
Contact name
Gillian Ward
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Coventry University
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
NA, NA
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 20 days
Research summary
Over 850,000 people are living with dementia in the UK (Mitchell et al 2016) with one third living in care homes (Prince et al 2014). Sleep disturbance in people with dementia is common and problematic, accompanied by confusion, wandering and agitation at night-time. Current non-pharmacological interventions include light therapy, increased physical/ social activity, plus good design of the sleep environment. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis (Abdelhamid et al 2016) of the effectiveness of interventions found there were no interventions to support those “night-owls” who sleep during the day.
WCS Care Ltd (a private care home company) have introduced innovative interventions for a good sleep environment including night time social activities which they have called the Wide-Awake Club. The Wide Awake Club was successfully introduced at Drovers House, Rugby to support occupational engagement and well-being for over a year. Informal observations have shown that after 12 months of delivering the Wide-Awake Club only 3 residents out of 16 residents who attended at the start of the programme were still regularly awake and “wandering” at night-time. The intervention will be introduced at Castle Brook, a new purpose built dementia WCS care home in summer 2017. The aim of this research is to carry out a pilot study of the Wide-Awake Club to investigate how the intervention supports occupational engagement and well-being of care home residents with dementia who have sleep disturbance and night-time wakefulness. The approach will be developed in collaboration with care home staff and will evaluate this existing intervention with the care home.
The mixed methods study of night-time social activities will include observations over 12 weeks of the current night time activity programme for residents and interviews with staff to ascertain what works to support occupational engagement of residents and the effects on well-being.REC name
West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/WM/0252
Date of REC Opinion
31 Aug 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion