Michelle Xue, PhD student, and her advisor Eleanor McConnell, associate professor, have received an award for their Southern Nursing Research Society (SNRS) Dissertation application entitled: “Dynamics of Symptom Experience and Functional Recovery in Nursing Home Residents with Dementia after Hip Fracture Surgery.” This proposal was funded for a one-year period with a start date of March 15, 2022.

Older adults with dementia are at higher risk for hip fracture and are subject to worse health outcomes than those without dementia. We lack information regarding how specific dementia symptoms or other comorbid illnesses influence recovery trajectories. This information is needed to inform development of targeted interventions to improve care outcomes. The proposed study aims to examine the longitudinal relationships between dementia-related symptoms and physical function recovery and the moderation effects of multimorbidity in those with dementia over one year after hip fracture surgery, guided by the working model of physical resilience. Secondary data analysis of national-level data from the Minimum Data Set (MDS) Long-Term Care 3.0 from years 2017 to 2019 will be conducted. Descriptive statistics will describe patient characteristics and organizational factors. In pre-analysis, patterns of physical function and dementia-related symptoms will be constructed using multi-trajectory modeling. Classes of multimorbidity and patterns of covariates measured longitudinally will be constructed using latent class analysis. To examine longitudinal relationships between dementia-related symptoms and physical function recovery, and the influence of multimorbidity, multinomial logistic regressions will be applied using results from the pre-analysis. These analyses will lay a foundation for symptom-specific or multimorbid disease-specific care approaches.