Social, Physical Environmental and Organizational Factors related to Recreational Activity of Residents with Dementia in Long-Term Care Homes: A Scoping Review Protocol
Authors: Zhang Ziying , Chaudhury Habib 
Published: September 2024

Introduction

Recreational activity is a rising topic in long-term care settings as it contributes to residents’ physical and emotional wellbeing. As residents’ abilities of sustaining and initiating activities decline, the care environment becomes vital in supporting residents maintain meaningful engagement in activities and life. Understanding how various aspects of the care environment influence residents’ opportunities and quality of recreational activity engagement is a timely and relevant topic in the context of improving quality of life for residents with dementia.

The research questions guiding this scoping review are: (1) How do staff characteristics and organisational policies influence residents’ levels of participation in planned and self-directed activities? (2) What is the role of the physical environmental features in common spaces of the care setting in supporting residents’ activity participation?

Methods and analysis

This review will follow the Arksey and O’Malley scoping review methodology. The search strategy will be applied to five bibliographic and citation databases. Study selection will occur in two steps: first, two reviewers will screen the titles and abstracts of all search results, and second, the first author will independently conduct a full-text review. Data will be extracted from the included studies and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis. The extracted data will be presented in a narrative format, accompanied by tables that reflect the review’s objectives.

Ethics and dissemination

Since the methodology of the study involves collecting data from publicly available publications, it does not require ethics approval. The findings will offer valuable insights to inform the design, practice and research of long-term care and recreational activities. The scoping review results will be disseminated through an open-access publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Strengths and Limitations

This review offers a targeted view of environmental aspects related to the recreational activity of residents with dementia in long-term care settings. Evidence of both physical and social dimensions of the care environment related to recreational activities will be extracted and summarized.

The review takes an inclusive approach to defining activities. Therefore, the findings will synthesize not only environmental factors that impact programmed recreational activities, but also those that encourage or limit opportunities for various kinds of meaningful spontaneous engagement.

Being a scoping rather than a systematic review, the quality of the evidence will not be evaluated. The results and recommendations of scoping reviews cannot be graded since methodological appraisal of the quality of included studies will not be conducted.

The review will be limited to English language studies.

Review will only include studies based in long-term care homes, studies evaluated the recreational activities in adult day care centres, hospitals or other healthcare settings will not be captured.