JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Dementia care training plays an important role in improving care quality, yet its content is often fragmented and unevenly structured. Little is known about how training priorities have evolved over time, limiting efforts to keep curricula aligned with changing care needs.

Objective:

To identify the core thematic domains of dementia care training and examine their temporal evolution to inform curriculum review and development.

Methods:

A corpus of 261 texts, including academic literature, policy documents, and training materials, was analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and expert-informed manual interpretation. Topic intensity was examined across five time periods from 2005 to 2025 using temporal analysis.

Results:

Five core topics and 15 subtopics were identified: (1) daily prevention and intervention; (2) palliative care and symptom management; (3) communication skills and caregiver role; (4) workflow and team-based training; and (5) individualized care and behavioral support. Temporal patterns suggested an earlier emphasis on communication- and team-related training, followed by increased prominence of palliative care, and more recently, individualized care approaches.

Conclusions:

This study provides a data-informed overview of dementia care training content and its temporal development across multiple source types. The findings suggest that training priorities have shifted over time in ways that are consistent with changing care demands, policy attention, and emerging technologies. These results may support more adaptive and context-sensitive approaches to curriculum review and training design. Future research should expand the geographic and linguistic scope of the corpus and further examine how thematic priorities identified in text are translated into real-world training practice.