Effects of a therapy dog program on the wellbeing of older veterans living in a long term care residence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Current health care practices do not adequately meet the health needs of older adult war veterans. Increasingly, animal assisted interventions (AAIs) are being identified as potentially beneficial for this population. To explore this, this study, informed by a One Health framework, measured the outcomes of the St. John Ambulance ( SJA ) Therapy Dog Program on the wellbeing of older adults at a Veterans Affairs Canada residence in Saskatchewan, Canada. Over a 13 week period, two groups of veterans, of 8 and 10 in number respectively, who were living at the residence were purposively selected to participate in weekly individual and group therapy dog visits. The type of visit varied according to the level of cognition of the veteran, with lower level individuals visiting in a group format. A modified instrumental case study design was applied incorporating both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including questionnaires, focus groups, case history, and observation. Quantitative measures were analyzed descriptively, and qualitative measures were analyzed thematically. The findings revealed a positive influence of therapy dogs on memory recollection and reminiscence among veterans; positive health impacts on veteran wellbeing as understood through the significance of the therapy dog team encounter; and, perceived meaningful support from the therapy dog handlers and love and support from the therapy dogs. The analysis is contextualized within the growing literature on AAIs and contributes important insights to adequately meeting the needs of older adult war veterans, and potentially for the increasing population of recent war veterans. Additionally, key policy, practice, and research recommendations are proposed, including further investigation of therapy dog visits.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".