gms | German Medical Science

Background/research question: Dementia care research aims to explore, assess, evaluate, and optimize the care and quality of life of people with dementia and their caregivers. To consider the perspective of people with dementia and to design, evaluate and implement effective interventions meeting their needs, research participation of persons with dementia is a fundamental step. However, the recruitment of people with dementia is challenging for various reasons, e.g., with regard to taboos and stigmatization, capacity or willingness to take part in research, and legal requirements. Our objective is (i) to identify barriers and facilitating factors for recruiting people with dementia and (ii) to assess the effectiveness of recruitment strategies in dementia care research.

Methods: To comprehensively collect and synthesize information from studies with multiple types of designs, we will conduct a mixed-methods systematic review. We consider empirical studies aiming at (i) the identification of facilitators and barriers to recruiting people with dementia in dementia care research or (ii) at the evaluation of recruitment strategies for people with dementia in dementia care research published in English or German without restriction concerning publication year, setting, type and severity of dementia, intervention, phenomena of interest or outcome.

We include opinion-based journal articles, such as commentaries, editorials, and lessons learned papers, if the authors reflect recruitment issues based on their own research experience. We do not consider studies evaluating recruitment limited to caregivers of people with dementia. Furthermore, we exclude conference proceedings and abstract-only publications. The search will take place in MEDLINE/PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science Core Collection, and in the Online Resource for Research in Clinical triAls (ORRCA). Supplementary web searching and citation tracking of eligible studies via Scopus will also be undertaken. We registered our review and will report detailed methods in the Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (CRD42022342600; Hirt et al. 2022).

Preliminary/expected results, outlook: The results of our review will allow to identify and to understand common recruitment barriers and facilitators in dementia care research. The findings will contribute to inform optimal recruitment strategies for people with dementia. At the conference, we will give an overview of our preliminary results.

Competing interests: All authors declare no conflict of interest.