Educational Support to a Family with a Member Suffering from Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common causes of dementia syndrome, gradually making a person dependent on someone else’s care and help. Alzheimer’s disease affects the functioning of the entire family of a member living with diagnosis, it puts family in a state of social need and can generate a non-developmental family crisis. Due to the multiple negative effects caused by this crisis, various services and support programs for families with a member with Alzheimer’s disease are developing. One type of these support programs is adult education. Considering the global trend of increasing number of people with diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, we recognize the need to make adult education more accessible to their families. It is necessary that such programs are available to families of people living with Alzheimer’s disease, and we decided to investigate what should be the content of such educational programs. Our research question is: what are the educational contents that are useful for families’ members of people with Alzheimer’s disease? In the search for an answer, we conducted 7 in-depth semi-structured interviews. Given that we are starting from the assumption that the process of creating educational content should be participatory, that all actors involved in the life of a member’s living with Alzheimer’s disease family should be included in it, research participants were families’ members of people living with Alzheimer’s disease, social care experts and caregivers. We searched for the similarities and differences in their opinions, in order to reach what is common. Our goal was to reach a compromise in the participants’ thinking, to reach the cross-sectional content of educational programs for the families of a person with Alzheimer’s disease. The research results show that the opinions of the research participants are very similar, they have more in common in their opinions than differences. Everyone agrees that members of families of people with Alzheimer’s disease need both the educational content about the Alzheimer’s disease itself, as well as the educational content related to family functioning and community services. This suggests that relatives of a person living with Alzheimer’s disease need a comprehensive education that will support them in various aspects of their lives.