Project 459671

The restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic by many governments to contain the spread of COVID-19 revealed challenges within the health care system, specifically for people with Alzheimer's disease or other dementias, informal carers, and health professionals. Addressing these challenges is currently hindered by limited concepts and measurement of care, uncoordinated methodological approaches across disciplines, and narrow dissemination approaches that are designed for specific fields. Thus, the DECOVEXP Expert Working Group aims to develop an interdisciplinary, international, and original reflection on the experience of the pandemic by older persons with Alzheimer's Disease or other dementias, informal care partners, and health professionals. The project has three main objectives to address these research needs: 1) To propose a theoretical and empirical holistic concept of care, based on the triptych patient-carer-healthcare professional, considering people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, health professionals, and informal carers and social workers; 2) to propose an innovative interdisciplinary and integrated approach that combines different disciplinary perspectives; and 3) to design an interdisciplinary training approach that can be adapted to different audiences. Our Canadian team will lead the development of a new methodological framework to explore the experiences of people with Alzheimer's and other dementias. We will conduct a comparative analysis of methods from other national teams and disciplines, compiling the issues identified when analysing the experiences among people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. We will then combine qualitative and quantitative approaches identified into a new methodological framework. We will share our methodological framework with the other teams and disseminate it as a publication.