Abstract
To compare the immediate response of nursing home residents to dog visits with or without an activity, and the impact of cognitive ability. In a randomly controlled trial, 174 nursing home residents were allocated to 12 bi-weekly 10-minute visits: either ordinary dog visits (D, n = 57, 49 analysed), dog visits with an activity (DA, n = 56, 48 analysed), or visits with activity but no dog (A, n = 61, 54 analysed). We recorded frequency and duration of residents' verbal and physical interactions with the dog and persons. Data were analysed in three periods of four visits (period 1-3) as binomial variables (generalised linear models) or durations (non-parametric statistics). Both visit type and impairment level affected the likelihood of interacting with the dog (D and DA). In some periods increased cognitive impairment lowered odds of touching the dog in DA visits (period 1: F1,85 = 5.17, P < 0.05) and talking to it directly (period 1: F1,90 = 4.60, P < 0.05; period 3: F1,87 = 5.34, P < 0.05). Throughout, residents talked less to persons during DA visits compared to D and A (P = 0.01-0.05), and level of cognitive impairment correlated negatively with talk duration (P < 0.001). Generally, high cognitive impairment level lowered odds of interacting with (period 1: F1,89 = 7.89, P < 0.01; period 2: F1,97 = 6.76, P = 0.01; period 3: F1,92 = 13.57, P < 0.001) and talking about the activities (period 1: F1,89 = 13.78, P <0.001; period 2: F1,88 = 3.27, P = 0.07; period 3: F1,86 = 3.88, P = 0.05). Visits without specific activities stimulated residents to interact with the dog, whereas increasing the complexity of dog visits by adding activities resulted in less interaction with the dog for severely impaired residents. The optimal dog visit for the less cognitively impaired residents could include activities and thereby a possibility to interact with the dog in different ways, whereas for severely impaired residents, just being with the dog seems more appropriate.
Highlights
Dog visits have become a popular activity in many nursing homes in Europe [1, 2], and organisations in Denmark and several other countries recruit volunteers and their dogs in order to facilitate contact to animals for nursing home residents [3, 4].Studies of how visits from dogs affect nursing home residents have mainly focussed on long-term benefits measured by psychometric scales evaluating symptoms of depression, loneliness, quality of life, impairment level and agitated behaviour in nursing home residents or persons with dementia
Visits without specific activities stimulated residents to interact with the dog, whereas increasing the complexity of dog visits by adding activities resulted in less interaction with the dog for severely impaired residents
We found that individual visits to nursing home residents accompanied by a dog, compared to a soft toy animal, stimulate the residents to engage more in physical interaction, conversation and eye contact to the visiting animals [18]
Summary
Dog visits have become a popular activity in many nursing homes in Europe [1, 2], and organisations in Denmark and several other countries recruit volunteers and their dogs in order to facilitate contact to animals for nursing home residents [3, 4].Studies of how visits from dogs affect nursing home residents have mainly focussed on long-term benefits measured by psychometric scales evaluating symptoms of depression, loneliness, quality of life, impairment level and agitated behaviour in nursing home residents or persons with dementia. Several reviews point out that the use of very different study settings makes it difficult to reach definite conclusions about specific effects of dog visits [6,7,8, 11,12,13]. These differences in study setup include the dogs’ role during visits, duration and frequency of visits, a large variation in the studies’ perspective and focus, difference in study design, not to mention suboptimal study designs, such as lack of appropriate control groups. Several reviews conclude that implementing dog visits in nursing homes has the potential to be a supplement treatment or activity and that future studies should investigate the actual mechanisms of how dogs affect nursing home residents while using appropriate effect measures of this [12,13,14]
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