Introduction
Several psychosocial multicomponent interventions have been developed to prevent and treat neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) in persons with dementia in the Netherlands:
- Integrative reactivation and rehabilitation (IRR);
- Grip on Challenging Behavior (Grip);
- Stepwise, Multidisciplinary Intervention for Pain and Challenging Behavior in Dementia (STA OP!)
These interventions all consist of a continuous loop of detection; analysis; treatment of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial problems; and evaluation. At the same time, these interventions slightly differ from each other. Although IRR, Grip, and STA OP! have been developed and proven to be effective when actually applied as intended, these programs are not broadly implemented within Dutch nursing homes beyond the research setting (Verstraeten et al., 2022). Taking into account the known facilitators and barriers, we have integrated the three programs into a single intervention method:
- STIP-Method, a personalized integrated stepped-care method to prevent and treat neuropsychiatric symptoms (Verstraeten et al., 2022).
Contemporarily, Sweden and Japan have developed and implemented psychosocial intervention programs for NPS that are based on the continuous loop as well as the STIP-Method; namely, BPSD-registry and DEMBASE (Nakanishi et al., 2021). BPSD-registry has been launched in November 2010, and 99.3% of municipalities has adopted the program in June 2022. In Japan, the national government recently decided to introduce DEMBASE into the national benefit scheme of public long-term care insurance system from April 2024.
Aim of the workshop
We aim to establish the international alliance of psychosocial multicomponent intervention programs for Neuro Psychiatric Symptoms of dementia. The alliance will be dedicated for future scientific publications utilizing the cross-country data, and serve as the global hub for other researchers who will be interested in introducing the program into their countries.
This workshop will be considered a success if we achieve a consensus of future research plans involving data sharing, analysis, and publication plans across the three countries.
