Relationships between Environmental Features and Behaviors of Dementia Residents - An Example of Long-term Care Facilities in Taipei

• Main Authors: Chian-Yao Tseng, 曾建堯
• Other Authors: 郭乃文
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/59883211928331296531

碩士 === 臺北醫學大學 === 醫務管理學研究所 === 95 === According to statistics of Ministry of the Interior, there are 2,287,029 elder people in Taiwan currently. A researcher predicted that the proportion of the elders will be over 37.0% at the year of 2051. In other words, aging is a serious problem in Taiwan, and the numbers of dementia elders are getting more and more. Patients with dementia almost have problems on speaking, memory, recognizing and so on, what influences not only the patients but also their carers and family seriously. There were many references about patients’ problem behaviors, and researcher discovered that there were relationships between environmental features and patients’ behaviors. However, most of studies in Taiwan didn’t focus on the relationships. Thus, the first aim of this study was to explore distinction of long-term care facilities’ environmental features and dementia patients’ problem behaviors between Taiwan and other contries. The second purpose was to understand the relationship between long-term care facilities’ environmental features and the residents’ behaviors. Last but not least, suggestions of this study can benefit long-term care facilities designers and future researchers. All environmet features’ and residents’ behaviors’ data on this theory obtained by observation was analyzed by Stepwise regression and hierarchical analysis methods. Environmental features, which were independent variables, can be categorized into two groups, public environment and residential environmet. Public environment including 4 dimensions, safety, stimulation, comfort and convenience, and recognization. Residential environment including safety, personalization, comfort and convenience, and privacy. Variables of residents’ behaviors, including positive behaviors and negative behaviors, were dependent variables. The results of this study were that environmental features can influence residents’ behaviors. First, more personalization features in residential environment did increase positive behaviors of residents. Second, although each dimension in public environment has no relationships with residents’ behaviors, residents’ negative behaviors were reduced by good public environmental designs significantly. Third, when considering both residential and public environmental features, public environmental features had negative relationship with residents’ negative behaviors. Besides, residential safety had negative relationships with their positive behaviors. The reason was that residents can do many things by themselves and had fewer chances to communicat with other residents and staff. In other words, staffs in the long-term care facilities usually do not take the initiative in communicating and helping residents. In short, this study suggested that facilities’ designers have to improve environmental features of facilities to increase residents’ positive and to reduce negative behaviors. Designers should make environemtal features safer, and staffs should take care and communicate with residents enthusiastically. In the future, researchers can focus on ‘safety’ in the environment to prove conclusion of this theory.