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. 2020 Aug 18;17(16):6004.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17166004.

The Impact of Implementing a Namaste Care Intervention in UK Care Homes for People Living with Advanced Dementia, Staff and Families

Isabelle Latham  1 , Dawn Brooker  1 , Jennifer Bray  1 , Nicola Jacobson-Wright  1 , Faith Frost  1
Affiliations

The Impact of Implementing a Namaste Care Intervention in UK Care Homes for People Living with Advanced Dementia, Staff and Families

Isabelle Latham et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Care homes can struggle to provide optimal care for residents with advanced dementia. Namaste Care provides a structured daily programme of physical, sensory and emotional care delivered by regular care workers. A three-year, mixed method process study of implementation and impact created a manualised Namaste Care Intervention for UK care homes (NCI-UK). This article reports on the impact of NCI-UK delivered consistently in five care homes for 12-24 weeks. Impact for residents was assessed using, pre-post data, showing significant positive effects for QUALID (t = 2.92, p = 0.01, n = 31) and CMAI (t = 3.31, p = 0.002, n = 32), alongside many qualitative examples of positive impacts on wellbeing, responsiveness and communication. Pre-post staff questionnaire data (n = 20) were not significant. Qualitative data indicated that NCI-UK is a positive staff experience, providing sense of purpose, improved wellbeing and relationships. The care homes reported benefiting from implementing NCI-UK in terms of reputation and quality improvement. Family interviews were also positive, relating to seeing the difference, improving relationships and being involved. NCI-UK can therefore be recommended as an impactful intervention for residents, staff and families.

Keywords: advanced dementia; care homes; change; implementation; long term care; namaste care; psychosocial intervention.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Frequency of NCI-UK sessions by care homes across implementation period (bold indicates 2 sessions in a day).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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