Development of Professional Care Program for Nurses in Dementia Wards and Its Educational Effects

Purpose: To develop an education program for nurses specializing in dementia care, and to investigate its effects.

Methods: An intervention study of nurses was conducted using a quasi-experiment with 3 randomly assigned groups. Participants were 51 nurses from a psychiatric hospital dementia ward, divided into an intervention program group (17 nurses), a knowledge-acquisition-only group (16 nurses), and a usual-care group (18 nurses) as controls. The program group intervention comprised 3 frameworks: motivation for achieving the task, acquisition of professional knowledge required for dementia care, and sharing of successful experiences based on professional knowledge. The knowledge-acquisition-only group received only the acquisition of professional knowledge framework, and the usual-care group received only the usual-care framework. The intervention period was 3 months.

Results: Post-intervention, the program group had a significantly greater sense of self-efficacy associated with professional knowledge and significantly greater self-efficacy associated with practice compared with the knowledge-acquisition-only and the usual-care groups. Professional knowledge was acquired by 80% of the program group, compared with 70% of the knowledge-acquisition-only group. A co-occurrence network diagram of the multivariate analysis results produced by text mining of the descriptive data indicated that nurses provided care for symptoms specific to different diseases based on their pathological mechanisms.

Conclusion: Program implementation led to the acquisition of deeper knowledge and greater self-efficacy by sharing expertise-based practices and successful experiences, compared with desk-based learning in a single workshop lecture, suggesting the program's usefulness in clinical practice.