Authors: Felc Zlata, GregorÄiÄ Andrej, Felc Brina, Stopar Mojca, Breznik Kristijan, Komadina Radko, Tasić Ilić Melita, Vodišek Razboršek Vesna, Jazbec Maša, Methans Šarlah Judita.
Introduction: Awareness and knowledge of the effectiveness of four supporting cornerstones (SC) (i.e. people, place, network, resources) for people with dementia (PWD) in rural region have not yet been well analysed. The purpose of the research was to collect data about general population's dementia-related knowledge and about the support for PWD according to the SC.
Methods: The research was done using a questionnaire evaluating dementia-related knowledge thereby comparing different groups of respondents, established on the basis of demographical parameters and, respectively, parameters, evaluating SC for PWD in the environment, as expressed by the respondents. For analysing statistically significant differences between groups, we used ANOVA, T-test and Spearman's correlation coefficient.
Results: The test's average estimate of dementia-related knowledge was high (9,23 out of 12). The performed
statistical analyses demonstrated no statistically significant differences in dementia-related knowledge among the compared groups, the only two exceptions being between respondents with different degrees of education and between the groups with different evaluations for levels of information support in their environment. While the first of the two differences was expected (respondents with higher education having higher degrees of knowledge), the result between the second pair of groups wasn't expected: the people judging their informational support as low had statistically higher grades of dementia-related knowledge.
Conclusions: The high general results of test with mostly no statistically significant differences among the compared groups might indicate either insufficient difficulty of questions or generally high dementia awareness, possibly due to effective measures for its spreading in the past.
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