Articles
Appropriate horticultural therapy task setting considering patient’s self-efficacy and personality: modeling the therapist’s perspective on elderly patients with dementia
Article number
1330_1
Pages
1 – 10
Language
English
Abstract
In recent years, the number of elderly patients with dementia has increased worldwide.
To have a high quality of life in old age, it is important to suppress or delay the onset and progression of dementia.
In horticultural therapy (HT) for the elderly, it is an important research theme to determine what tasks the therapist presents to the patient to maintain cognitive ability.
In previous studies, cognitive abilities were determined not only by age or onset of dementia, but also by self-efficacy (SE), which is the ability to recognize ones potential to perform a task, and personality, particularly conscientiousness.
This indicates the unsuitability of presenting some types of gardening tasks to the elderly as a horticultural task.
The presented task will have no positive value for the patient from a therapeutic viewpoint if the task is complicated and the meaning of the task cannot be understood; SE is low and the patient is not self-motivated; or the task is not interesting and cannot be taken seriously.
We proposed that the therapists horticultural task setting should be appropriate for the patients SE and personality, rather than based on the therapists experience and intuition.
Therefore, we considered a dynamic model based on a systems approach, in which factors related to patients and therapists were included.
In this paper, we used this approach to visualize the relationship between the therapist and the patient in HT and created a time-dependent dynamic model.
This model was used to simulate 12 months of HT practice.
The simulation results showed the horticultural task considering the patients SE and personality, and suggested that the patients SE increased by continuing such tasks for 12 months.
The dynamic model of HT may assist the therapists work in providing an optimal horticultural task to the patient.
To have a high quality of life in old age, it is important to suppress or delay the onset and progression of dementia.
In horticultural therapy (HT) for the elderly, it is an important research theme to determine what tasks the therapist presents to the patient to maintain cognitive ability.
In previous studies, cognitive abilities were determined not only by age or onset of dementia, but also by self-efficacy (SE), which is the ability to recognize ones potential to perform a task, and personality, particularly conscientiousness.
This indicates the unsuitability of presenting some types of gardening tasks to the elderly as a horticultural task.
The presented task will have no positive value for the patient from a therapeutic viewpoint if the task is complicated and the meaning of the task cannot be understood; SE is low and the patient is not self-motivated; or the task is not interesting and cannot be taken seriously.
We proposed that the therapists horticultural task setting should be appropriate for the patients SE and personality, rather than based on the therapists experience and intuition.
Therefore, we considered a dynamic model based on a systems approach, in which factors related to patients and therapists were included.
In this paper, we used this approach to visualize the relationship between the therapist and the patient in HT and created a time-dependent dynamic model.
This model was used to simulate 12 months of HT practice.
The simulation results showed the horticultural task considering the patients SE and personality, and suggested that the patients SE increased by continuing such tasks for 12 months.
The dynamic model of HT may assist the therapists work in providing an optimal horticultural task to the patient.
Authors
S. Mita, M. Hosokawa, T. Hayashi
Keywords
dynamic framework, dynamic model, PDCA cycle, systems approach
Online Articles (34)