Commentary on: Clemson L, Stark S, Pighills AC, Fairhall NJ, Lamb SE, Ali J, Sherrington C. Environmental interventions for preventing falls in older people living in the community. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2023 Mar 10;3(3):CD013258. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD013258.pub2
Home fall hazard assessments are shown to be effective in fall prevention among community-dwelling older adults at higher risk of falls. Future work should investigate the feasibility of implementing these interventions in practice settings. It is uncertain whether assistive technologies can prevent falls in community-dwelling older adults, thus further research is needed.
Nearly 30% of older adults aged 65 years and older fall each year.
To evaluate the attitudes of Indian nurses towards the importance of family involvement in nursing care and the association between nurse attitudes and sociodemographic characteristics.
Involving the family in the care process is crucial for delivering family- and patient-centred care and ensuring the best possible patient outcomes. Nevertheless, published literature revealed that the nurses may lack clarity regarding the role of family members in the patient's care, which in turn hinders families' participation in care.
Cross-sectional descriptive study. The STROBE checklist was used to report the present study.
A total of 203 Nurses participated in a prospective cross-sectional study between May 2022 and August 2022. They were recruited through convenience sampling from two tertiary care centres in India. A two-part questionnaire was used to gather the data; the first section contained questions for gathering sociodemographic information, and the second part contained the standardized FINC-NA scale.
The mean age of the nurses was (28.08 ± 4.722) years, and their median professional experience was 2.5 (1–5.5) years. Nurses' attitude regarding family's importance in patient care was found to be significantly associated (p ≤ .05) with education level, marital status, religion and hometown region.
In several items Indian nurses have positive attitudes towards family involvement in care but some of the lower scoring items can present opportunities for focused improvement. Continuing development programmes about family-centered care can constitute important strategies to improve the positive attitudes of nurses towards families in practice.
No patient or public contribution.
Mindfulness-based interventions are becoming increasingly popular and are effective in lowering depressive symptoms and caregiver burden. However, the overall efficacy of therapies in stress and anxiety management is unreported, and no study to date has performed a subgroup analysis to investigate the intervention dose response of outcomes.
To quantitatively identify the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for caregivers of persons living with dementia.
A comprehensive literature search of six databases was undertaken from the date of inception to June 18, 2023. The DerSimonian–Laird model with random effects was used to examine the overall effect and its heterogeneity in the studies. Version 2 of the risk of bias (RoB 2) tool was employed to analyze the publication bias of each randomized study. Funnel and forest plots were created to represent the findings.
Thirteen randomized trials were included in the meta-analysis. Mindfulness-based interventions significantly reduced stress and anxiety of caregivers of persons living with dementia. In addition, interventions provided for ≥8 weeks were beneficial in reducing depression in caregivers. However, mindfulness-based interventions did not offer significant benefits in reducing depression or caregiver burden immediately after the intervention.
Mindfulness-based interventions have the potential to help caregivers of people living with dementia. This study could be used as a model for future research into and implementation of mindfulness-based therapies for caregivers.
Mindfulness-based therapies appear to alleviate stress and anxiety but are ineffective in reducing depression and burden in caregivers of persons living with dementia. Well-designed RCTs with more rigorous methodology and a larger sample size should be conducted to firm the conclusion of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for caregivers of persons living with dementia.