Office of Education, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Geriatric Mental Health Services, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
PLoS One. 2020 Aug 27;15(8):e0238096. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238096. eCollection 2020.
The benefits of involving patients as partners in research across diverse medical and psychiatric settings are well established in the literature. However, researchers continue to struggle to access, engage and retain participants from hard-to-reach populations. The main objective of this study was to co-create pet therapy activities with patients admitted for serious and complex mental illness to a large urban mental health and addiction hospital. Informed by the principles of participatory action research methodology, we conducted focus group discussions with 38 inpatients in seven different clinical units. An experienced volunteer handler and a certified therapy dog helped facilitate our discussions. Participating researchers, recreational therapists, volunteer handlers and our participants all reported that the presence of a certified therapy dog at each of our discussions was integral to their success. Certified therapy dogs increased the motivation to participate in our study, helped to build rapport with participants and created connections in our discussions that enriched our data. To our knowledge our study is the first to demonstrate the value of using a therapy dog as a participatory research tool in a healthcare setting. The authors believe that therapy dogs are a low-tech intervention that could be used effectively to engage hard-to-reach populations in research about their treatment and care in a diverse range of medical settings. These findings support the creation of a pilot study to test the value of including therapy dogs in patient-centered research with vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations.
将患者作为合作伙伴纳入不同医学和精神科环境中的研究的好处在文献中已有充分的记载。然而，研究人员仍然难以接触、参与和留住来自难以接触的人群的参与者。本研究的主要目的是与在大型城市精神卫生和成瘾医院住院的严重和复杂精神疾病患者共同创建宠物治疗活动。本研究遵循参与式行动研究方法学的原则，在七个不同的临床科室中与 38 名住院患者进行了焦点小组讨论。一位经验丰富的志愿者处理员和一只经过认证的治疗犬协助我们进行了讨论。参与的研究人员、娱乐治疗师、志愿者处理员和我们的参与者都报告说，在我们的每次讨论中，一只经过认证的治疗犬的存在对于讨论的成功至关重要。经过认证的治疗犬增加了参与我们研究的动力，有助于与参与者建立融洽关系，并在我们的讨论中建立联系，丰富了我们的数据。据我们所知，我们的研究首次证明了在医疗保健环境中使用治疗犬作为参与式研究工具的价值。作者认为，治疗犬是一种低技术干预措施，可以有效地用于在各种医疗环境中吸引难以接触的人群参与关于他们的治疗和护理的研究。这些发现支持创建一项试点研究，以测试在以患者为中心的研究中纳入治疗犬对弱势和难以接触的人群的价值。
