The Development and Evaluation of a Culturally Tailored Support Group Program on the Psychosocial Wellbeing of Family Caregivers of Individuals Living With Dementia in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is also facing the increasing prevalence of dementia. Evidence states that dementia caregivers have poor psychosocial wellbeing including stress, depression and anxiety. Effective services and interventions should be provided to the caregivers to improve their psychosocial wellbeing. Recent studies suggest that cultural adapted intervention is necessary. Such intervention can support caregivers to improve psychosocial wellbeing by using the culture and rituals to relevant racial caregivers creatively. Among all interventions for dementia caregivers, it was reported that the support group/program was more effective to improve psychosocial well-being of dementia caregivers. However, the studies about support group for dementia caregivers did not report the cultural sensitivity elements explicitly. Most of them mention the component 'language' only. Other elements, including philosophical thoughts, had not been mentioned in the articles. It is necessary to provide more cultural components including philosophical thoughts in the support groups. Moreover, the studies did not report on the benefits of adding cultural elements in the interventions to dementia caregivers. Although the literature mentioned cultural adapted interventions were beneficial, the research on understanding its benefits is inadequate. More caregiver intervention studies to understand the advantages of cultural tailoring are needed. Hence, we need to do more studies to understand the benefits of adding cultural elements in the interventions to caregivers. A research is performed to develop and evaluate a culturally adapted intervention for dementia caregivers to improve their psychosocial wellbeing.

This research study is to evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of culturally tailored interventions for caregivers of older adults with dementia on improving psychosocial well-being. Mixed method and quasi-experimental design will be applied. There are 2 groups: intervention and control groups. Each group needs to complete pre and post-test to assess their psychosocial well-beings. The pre and post-test data will be used for assessing the effectiveness of the culturally tailored intervention program for the dementia caregivers. For intervention group, qualitative data, i.e. data from focus group interview will be performed to assess the benefits of inclusion of cultural elements in the program.