Live Simulation’s Impact on Dementia-Centered Empathy

Abstract:

As our population ages, there are increasing numbers of people with dementia. Living with dementia represents numerous challenges to the individual living with it, their loved ones, and the healthcare system. Care required by someone with dementia is highly specific to each person. For patients to have the best care, it is important for them and their caregivers to have a strong relationship; empathy can be key in that relationship. The current study focused on training nursing and engineering students via the Dementia Live Simulation. The simulation provides participants with the opportunity to experience many of the sensory alterations experienced by patients living with dementia. The simulation involves, wearing gloves that are designed to mimic the tactile changes experienced by a patient living with dementia, glasses that provide participants with a sense of peripheral vision loss, and headphones that play sounds to momentarily confuse participants. Our hypotheses were (1) that there would be a significant increase in empathy scores between pre- and post-tests and (2) that empathy would be higher for nursing students than engineering students. Participants completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the Behrend Dementia Empathy Scale, a new 16-question scale designed to measure empathy more specifically related to dementia (BDES; Eaton, 2018) before and after the Dementia Live Simulation. The difference between pre- and post-test scores was reliable for the BDES, but not the TAS-20. This was driven by the scores of the nursing students, as shown in the interaction of pre-post scores with major. Supporting the second hypothesis, nursing majors scored higher than engineering majors in both scales.  These results suggest that while simulation technologies such as Dementia Live® could change caregivers’ awareness and empathy toward patients living with dementia in some groups of people, other methods need to be developed to increase empathy in a wider audience.