Jan Stoop Price 2020 for COSMOS article

Each year, Verenso, the Dutch association of elderly care physicians, awards an elderly care physician (in training) for a recently published article: the ‘Jan Stoop Price’. This price is an incentive price named after Jan Stoop, who was one of the pioneers of nursing home medicine in the Netherlands (1927-2009). He dedicated himself with lots of energy until he was at an old age for the substantive development and quality of the care for older people, especially in nursing homes.

This year, Paulien van Dam won this prize for her article ‘Quality of life and pain medication use in persons with advanced dementia living in long-term care facilities’. The article was written as a cooperation between the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and SEFAS in Bergen, Norway. The study analyzed baseline data from COSMOS: Communication, Systematic Assessment and Treatment of Pain, Medication Review, Occupational Therapy, and Safety Study; a multicenter, cluster-randomized effectiveness-implementation clinical hybrid trial in 67 Norwegian long-term care facility (LTCF) clusters, the COSMOS trial.

We aimed to (1) compare characteristics of persons with advanced dementia living in LTCFs with and without pain medication; (2) compare quality of life (QoL) in these persons with and without pain, stratified by type of pain medication use; and (3) explore associations between the use of paracetamol and QoL in persons with advanced dementia living in LTCFs. Our conclusions were that persons with advanced dementia living in LTCF using pain medication have a lower QoL compared with those not using pain medication. These results are of key importance for the clinician, because they stress the need for regular medication review and pain management.