For people with dementia, a behaviour known as critical wandering can quickly lead to devastating consequences. Unable to reorient themselves, these people are at risk of harm from critical injuries to fatalities. A recent project aims to address the risk of people with dementia going missing by first gaining a better understanding of the factors associated with critical wandering and a subsequent missing incident.
"Critical wandering — a term that is being continually revisited because it is controversial and not accepted in some areas such as the U.K. due to associated stigma — is when you are disoriented in time and space," explains Antonio Miguel-Cruz, an associate professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and U of A lead on the project. "You don't know where you are, you are disoriented, and as a result you're not able to find your way home or back to where you started your journey."
The project, conducted in collaboration with the University of Waterloo, is the first of its kind to examine various Canadian data sets documenting missing incidents due to critical wandering. The insights from this work are critical for developing targeted tools and prevention strategies that can be used by everyone from police and first responders to community members and other organizations that interact with people with dementia.
Researchers found that about 40 per cent of people with dementia will wander or get lost at least once, and nearly 20 per cent will experience repeated incidents. However, according to Miguel-Cruz, "This phenomenon is not very well understood."
This poor understanding lies in the way relevant data is handled. It's often unstructured, and documented in PDFs or other unsearchable documents. "It's not like in other cases in health records where you can search a database and extract organized and structured information to study a problem." He also says the information is tracked and compartmentalized differently in different organizations and agencies that have little or no common means to share insights and strategies.
To better understand this issue, Miguel-Cruz and his collaborators looked at missing incidents due to critical wandering data from six police departments across Canada, the British Columbia Search and Rescue Association, Indigenous communities in Quebec, the MedicAlert Foundation records and data covering nearly 1.6 million home care client critical wandering incidents sourced from interRAI, a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners.
