Interventions to promote mental health and well-being of nursing home residents - a scoping review

According to the Public Health Agency of Sweden, the mental health of older people (65+) is a major public health concern.

Reduced mental health is common among older people in general and even more frequent among older people who live in nursing homes. A majority of Swedish nursing home residents report having problems regarding anxiety or feelings of unease.

However, reduced mental health is often not detected, either by the older person him/ herself, their family members or by health and social care providers, due to limited knowledge about manifestations of mental health problems in older people, misconceptions that depressive and other symptoms are a result of ´normal´ ageing, and/ or ageistic attitudes.

Despite knowledge about the high prevalence of a range of mental health problems among older nursing home residents, there seems to be a lack of research studies about mental health promotive interventions/ working methods in a Swedish nursing home context, and international litterature reviews often have a very narrow focus and each only include studies about a specific intervention.

Therefore, there is a need to both thoroughly and comprehensively, review existing knowledge by including studies from different research fields, investigating a diversity of interventions, evaluated through various methods.

The aim of the proposed scoping review is to summarise and disseminate current research findings on interventions to promote the mental health and well-being of nursing home residents.

In addition, the aim is to identify promising interventions suitable to develop and test further in a Swedish nursing home context.A scoping review design is chosen to obtain a thorough and comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on a variety of interventions to promote mental health and well-being of nursing home residents.

Such a design allows the inclusion of a wide range of studies, with various research designs and methodologies, from different research fields The resulted knowledge would provide researchers, policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders with an up-to-date overview of the research findings on mental health promotion for older nursing home residents and support the development of robust mental health promotive measures in nursing home contexts, in Sweden and elsewhere.