Role of Activity Professionals in Applying APIE Model to Enhance Residents’ Activity and Engagement in Long-Term Care Settings

Abstract

Residents’ activity is a strong contributor to the quality of life in long-term care facilities. Hence, activity professionals have an essential role to play in enhancing residents’ activity engagement. Professional practice model for activity professionals includes Assessment, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation (APIE model). Although activity professionals have made advances in demonstrating their value, few studies have focused on the APIE model for activity professionals in long-term care facilities. A survey was conducted to help understand the role of activity professionals in using APIE in long-term care. Questionnaires were completed by 195 activity professionals working as activity directors and activity staff in long-term care settings. The major factors studied were job background, certification, and the performance of activity professionals using the APIE model. Findings showed that 11.8% of the activity professionals had a high school education, 12.3% had no certification, and 9.2% of them had unrelated certifications. When examining the APIE model, we found that activity professionals used person-centered approaches when they assessed residents` needs and wants, planned and implemented the activities, but lacked evaluation when measuring the outcomes; 79.5% of the participants were not tracking the number of minutes residents spent on activities; and 72.8% of the respondents did not measure the impact of resident engagement on clinical outcomes such as falls, depression, cognition, and medication use. Lack of professional training and the application meaningful evaluation related to the impact of activities with residents by activity professionals may challenge administrators’ capacity of estimating the need, value, and role of activity professionals within long-term care facilities. The study advocates for applying the APIE process to the delivery of activities and evaluation of the benefits of residents` activity and engagement.