How Do Spouses Experience Living Alone After Their Partner With Dementia Moves Into a Care Home?
Barbara Pope, Leslie Gelling, Sharon Holland and 1 others
PMID 40454662WHAT IT FOUND
Spouses left at home after a partner with dementia enters a care home often describe loss, guilt and grief.
Visiting can feel like duty, surveillance or relieving loneliness. Some report practical relief, yet many feel unable to move on.
Key findings
01Spouses described losing a shared past, being left alone with memories, and losing a future together.
02Visiting a partner in a care home served several purposes: maintaining couplehood, checking care, relieving loneliness, and guilt or duty.
03Spouses often felt guilt about relief and moving on, and some described waiting for closure after their partner died.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Only eight papers were included, and three were rejected, so the review rests on a small body of evidence. The search was limited to English papers published between 1 January 2002 and 30 August 2022. The included papers came from a few countries with different social care systems, so spouse experiences may not match other settings. The review did not include spouses who said they were ambivalent or unhappy in their marriage, people from different ethnicities, same-sex relationships or second marriages. It does not give a total number of spouses analysed, so the participant base is unclear. The evidence is descriptive. It does not test whether any care home transition support changes outcomes. Depression and anxiety findings were inconsistent across papers, so no single direction can be stated.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not give an author conflict of interest or funding declaration. The article is tagged as research support, non US government.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this review as showing that care home placement causes lasting depression or that family support works. The papers describe spouses' experiences, and depressive symptoms and anxiety were sometimes as high as before and sometimes improved, so no cause or treatment effect is demonstrated.