This study focuses on meaning in life for people with severe dementia. An experience of meaningfulness in life is considered to be a primary need for all human beings, and there is no research suggesting that this is different for people with dementia. On the contrary, being challenged by cognitive, functional, and social changes suggests that experience of meaning is in particular relevant for people with severe dementia. In recent years there has been some research on meaning and dementia, but more knowledge is needed to be able to understand, meet, address this need for meaning in life.
Aim and research question
The overall purpose of this study is to establish knowledge to provide a better and more personalised healtcare service and to protect patients’ rights when it comes to facilitating the existential need for meaning in life for persons with severe dementia. The study focuses on how meaning can appear and be experienced from the perspective of the patients, and how healthcare professionals experience and interpret meaning in life in the patients with dementia.
Study 1
The research question in Study 1 related to how meaning-making and meaningfulness can be observed and identified in patients with severe dementia in hospital.
Aim: To explore and articulate how meaning-making appears and how meaningfulness is experienced in persons with severe dementia.
Study 2
The research question in Study 2 related to how meaning-making and the experience of meaning, based on the experiences and observations of carers working in a specialised dementia ward in hospital, could be recognized in patients with severe dementia.
Aim: To explore how healthcare professionals working in interdisciplinary treatment and care in hospital perceive and interpret expressions of meaning in life in patients with severe dementia.
Study 3
The research question in Study 3 related to how healthcare professionals’ own experiences and understandings of meaning in life for persons with dementia and how meaning in life could be preserved in care of patients with dementia.
Aim 3: To explore how healthcare professionals interpret the patients’ experiences of meaning in life in practise for patients with severe dementia in a hospital and nursing home context, and to highlight its clinical implications.
