A nursing mentoring programme on non-pharmacological interventions against BPSD: Effectiveness and use of antipsychotics-A retrospective, before-after study.
Roxane Plante-Lepage, Philippe Voyer, Pierre-Hugues Carmichael and 1 others
PMID 34612586WHAT IT FOUND
Nurse mentoring on non-drug dementia care improved behavioural and psychological symptoms in 134 older adults, but antipsychotic prescriptions fell only about 10% and the proportion of users stayed similar.
Key findings
01About four weeks after nurse mentoring, 93.3% of 134 residents improved on the CMAI and 99.3% improved on the CNIS.
02Mean BPSD scores fell from 51.9 to 37.8 on the CMAI and from 33.7 to 11.0 on the CNIS.
03Mean antipsychotic prescriptions fell by about 10%, from 1.2 to 1.09 after adjustment.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
There was no control group, so changes over time or other care could explain the results. It was a retrospective chart review, so records were incomplete and some confounders were not measured. Many files were excluded: 294 of 428, so 134 remained; medication analyses used 99 because 35 profiles were incomplete. The intervention was a bundle of mentoring, education, care-plan changes, medication review, follow-up support, and several types of non-drug activities; the study could not tell which part helped. Follow-up was only about four weeks, so longer-term effects are unknown.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that nurse mentoring alone caused a large reduction in antipsychotic prescribing. The proportion of residents using antipsychotics did not change significantly, and the mean number of prescriptions fell only about 10% in an uncontrolled before-after study.