Dr Ruth Brookman

Overview

Both verbal and non-verbal human interactions can be disrupted for a person living with dementia.

Someone who has dementia may not be able to find the right word or name an everyday object, and they may have difficulties with memory and comprehension. This can lead to challenging behaviours and social withdrawal.

These issues can also make it difficult for carers to interact with the person they care for, which can have a significant impact on the relationship and is a major risk of caregiver burden and distress.

Dr Brookman studies the how to build relationships and facilitate meaningful social engagement for people living with dementia.

Her work is based on her earlier studies of mother-infant interactions, in which she recognised similarities in carer burden and coping strategies with familial carers of people living with dementia.

She determines what verbal (use of preferred language) and non-verbal (prosody, body movement, facial expression) features of communication on the part of carers are associated with quality interactions and engagement for older people receiving formal and informal aged care.

I am using what we know about the role of social interactions with carers to maximise communication success and wellbeing when a family member has dementia.

Impact

Dr Brookman's research in identifying and evaluating the verbal and non-verbal ways of achieving meaningful social engagement will inform the development of measures and training to improve interactions between older people and their carers across a range of care settings and populations. This in turn will improve wellbeing for quantity and quality of social interactions within aged care settings, especially for residents living with dementia.

The recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety found that residents with dementia in residential care have few or no visitors. Dr Brookman’s research would enable families to interact more effectively with each other and reduce social isolation for those who are living with disease.

I imagine a future where family and paid caregivers are confident and trained in strategies that enhance meaningful social connection for people living with dementia.

In addition, Dr Brookman is receiving ongoing funding from Japanese technology company NTT for an industry-funded project to interview carers and people living with dementia about their lives and their needs, with the goal of developing new assistive technologies to enhance meaningful activities and quality of life.

Career

Dr Brookman is a trained speech pathologist and clinical psychologist whose clinical experience and research interests cover the lifespan.

In mid-2021, she graduated with a combined PhD/Master of Clinical Psychology. Her PhD research examined interactions between mothers and infants, and how these interactions might be disrupted for mothers experiencing postnatal stress and anxiety. She found that infants' home language environment and the quality of mothers’ interactions with their infants in the first year of life predicted infants’ vocabulary at 18-months over and above maternal depression and anxiety symptoms.

Continuing as a research fellow at Western Sydney University, her main research interest is in supporting wellbeing and social interactions between people with dementia and their caregivers.

In 2021, she was awarded a competitive research fellowship in Healthy Aging: Caregiving and Mental Health. This project has expanded her PhD research on caregiver interactions to the aged care context, to determine what effective interaction looks like between carers and care recipients and to determine the similarities and differences across the lifespan.

Her work includes programs to enhance interactions between care staff and aged care residents, as well as current data collection on how engagement practitioners use linguistic and non-linguistic techniques to facilitate relationship-building and meaningful interactions with aged care residents, including those with dementia.

Overall, her vision is to use a suite of in-the-moment and long-term measures to understand quality social interactions in care contexts, and to develop novel programs that facilitate such good quality.

1. Her PhD project examining mother-infant interactions and subsequent publication  with Child Development is an example of the significant contribution her work and findings made to her research field. This paper was the first to investigate the effect of maternal depression and anxiety symptoms on infants’ home language environment and vocalisations in their first year of life, and then their vocabulary size at 18 months.

2. The quality of her research was recognised during her PhD via successful applications to competitive schemes including the MARCS PhD Writing Fellowship and Western to the World (WttW). She has also worked with my supervisor Dr Harris to secure industry partner funding for our research.

3. In her position as an Associate Postdoctoral Research Fellow employed by Dr Celia Harris within the MARCS Institute, she has been a member of a multi-disciplinary international team across university researchers and industry partners, collaborating with WSU, Deakin University, and a global technology company NTT Pty Ltd. Research with an industry partner required commitment to ambitious milestones and deliverables, and the team met all deadlines to successfully deliver the first phase of the project, resulting in substantial additional funding and phases.

4. In 2021, she was awarded a competitive research fellowship in Healthy Aging: Caregiving and Mental Health. To extend the scope of her doctoral work, extending from child development across lifespan contexts, she has worked with national and international experts to develop a joint project exploring the application of developmental principals of attunement (mother-infant interactions) to special population groups at the other end of the life spectrum.

5. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Australian Association of Gerontology Research Trust RM Gibson 2022 grant.

Collaboration

Dr Brookman works with collaborators from aged care to develop, test, refine and implement tools and resources for enhancing interactions between older people and their carers.

Her partnerships with aged care organisations and Carers NSW provide clear translational pathways into aged care practice. Outcomes will contribute to building confidence in new strategies adopting technology and social engagement strategies to enhance resident wellbeing.

Future projects are welcomed with aged care, allied health, education, clinical psychology, gerontology, speech pathology, cognitive science and psycholinguistics to assist with the clear pathways for the translation of research findings into aged care practice.

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