Rural stakeholder perceptions about cognitive screening

Abstract

Objectives: The study aims were to explore stakeholder perceptions about cognitive screening in a rural, ethnically diverse, underserved setting, and to examine whether perceptions varied by years lived in a rural area, career, health literacy, willingness to be screened, ethnicity, education, or age.

Methods: Twenty-one rural, ethnically diverse stakeholders completed an open-ended interview of five questions and a measure regarding perceptions about cognitive screening (PRISM-PC, Boustani, et al., 2008). Open coding using the in vivo process (Saldaña, 2015) to “derive codes from the actual participant language” (p. 77) was used to analyze the qualitative data. We used Pearson correlation to examine relationships between the PRISM-PC and sociodemographics including age, years of education, health literacy, years lived in rural areas, and willingness to participate in cognitive screening.

Results: Eight codes and two themes were identified from the in vivo analysis. The eight codes were “a sentence being pronounced over the lives”, “keep everybody at home”, “Education is big”, the trust issues is everything here”, “identify support systems”, “access to care”, and “there is a cost to do that”. The two themes were “Trust is the essential component of connecting with Community”, and (2) “The Community recognizes the importance of knowledge in improving care. PRISM-PC results added new information in that persons were concerned about the emotional and financial burden on their families. Overall, regardless of age, careers, care involvement, health literacy, or education, 81% of stakeholders indicated they would seek annual cognitive screening.

Discussion: It is important for rural health professionals to consider that contrary to previous stigma concerns, stakeholders may support earlier dementia detection.

Keywords:

• Screening and diagnosis
• beliefs/attitudes
• cultural aspects
• psychological and social aspects
• mild cognitive impairment