A visual approach to facilitating conversations about supportive care options in the context of cognitive impairment

Background

Persons with cognitive impairment may experience difficulties with language and cognition that interfere with their ability to communicate about health-related decision making.

Objective

We developed a visual elicitation technique to facilitate conversations about preferences concerning potential future supportive care needs and explored the utility of this technique in a qualitative interview study.

Methods

We conducted 15 online interviews with persons with mild cognitive impairment and mild to moderate dementia, using storytelling and a virtual tool designed to facilitate discussion about preferences for supportive care. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using an inductive qualitative data analysis method. We report our findings with respect to several main themes. First, we considered participants’ perspectives on supportive care. Next, we examined the utility of the tool for engaging participants in conversation through two themes: cognitive and communicative processes exhibited by participants; and dialogic interactions between the interviewer and the participant.

Results

With respect to participants’ perspectives on supportive care, common themes included considerations relating to informal caregivers such as availability and burden, and the quality of care options such as paid caregivers. Other themes, such as the importance of making decisions as a family, considerations related to facing these challenges on one’s own, and the fluid nature of decision making, also emerged. Common communicative processes included not being responsive to the question and unclear responses. Common cognitive processes included uncertainty and introspection, or self-awareness, of one's cognitive abilities. Last, we examined dialogic interactions between the participant and the interviewer to better understand engagement with the tool. The interviewer was active in using the visualization tool to facilitate the conversation, and participants engaged with the interface to varying degrees. Some participants expressed greater agency and involvement through suggesting images, elaborating on their or the interviewer’s comments, and suggesting icon labels.

Conclusion

This article presents a visual method to engage older adults with cognitive impairment in active dialogue about complex decisions. Though designed for a research setting, the diverse communication and participant-interviewer interaction patterns observed in this study suggest that the tool might be adapted for use in clinical or community settings.