Richeson and McCullough Foster Animal-Assisted Partnerships

Janice Dobson started visiting Portland’s Seaside Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in order to get her boxers, Braille and Bubba, certified as therapy dogs so that they could take part in a recently completed USM research project. But Dobson, who went on to participate in the research project with her dog Bubba, was so inspired by her initial work at Seaside that she continues to visit once a week.

“The benefits are not only to the people we are visiting, but also to the staff and the family of the residents,” Dobson says. One woman, the daughter of a resident that Dobson and Braille visited, gave Dobson money and told her to buy her blind boxer a new toy because he was what was keeping her mother going.

Like Dobson, many of those who participated in a research project, conducted by USM nursing faculty Nancy Richeson and William McCullough, say the benefits of taking dogs into nursing homes they visited were readily evident in the smiles, hugs, and sense of calm that the residents shared when stroking the back or scratching the ears of their dog visitors.

“A lot of people know intuitively that it’s helpful to have animals around, but when you are introducing them into a health care environment, you need to show the benefits in a concrete way,” explains McCullough, who is an associate professor of recreation and leisure studies.

He and Richeson, an assistant professor of recreation and leisure studies, teamed up during the spring semester to examine whether or not an animal-assisted therapy program would have any measurable impact on the subjective well-being of selected senior citizens.

Through interviews conducted before the visits began and then afterwards, the professors found that those who were visited by teams that included a dog were more satisfied with the quality of their lives compared to those who were visited by teams of only students. The results, however, did not show any significant impact on the mood of those visited by the dog teams. Richeson surmises that may be due to the short length of the project, which consisted of just four weekly visits.

“It definitely decreases social isolation,” she says. “The residents were coming out of their rooms, reminiscing about their former pets. The dogs were an easy conversation starter.”

In order to determine if an animal-assisted therapy program could affect the mood of residents, Richeson says a project might have to consist of more frequent visits, maybe every day for three weeks. “I do think it has an effect on people’s moods, if only temporarily,” says Richeson, who’s black lab, Meigs, a certified therapy dog, stretched out on the floor nearby. “The environment that it creates is very pleasant, to say the least.”

While other studies have been done in this area, McCullough says none have conclusively answered the question of whether introducing a dog into a therapeutic environment, like a nursing home or pediatric unit, actually contributes to patients’ improving health.

Dogs have been used therapeutically for hundreds of years in Europe, particularly in Germany and England. But the first incidence of dogs being used this way in the United States was after World War II at an Army-Air Force base in New York, McCullough notes. In the 1950s, child psychologist Boris Levinson discussed his early experiences with autistic children and his own dog, Jingles, but critics scoffed at the notion that visits with a dog could in any way be therapeutic. Today, more than 50 years later, there is more wide spread interest in animal assisted therapy, says McCullough, and most recognize it “can be an integral part of a therapeutic environment.”

The professors incorporated their research project into the spring semester offering of McCullough’s Perspectives on Animal-Assisted Therapy course. However, before they could get started they needed to find a dozen certified therapy dogs and their owners to participate. When they could not locate enough certified dogs in the area, the professors developed training sessions to certify dogs and went about recruiting volunteers and their dogs. The volunteers included members of the USM faculty and staff, community volunteers, like Janice Dobson, and even several participants of USM’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Richeson, who is registered to train would-be therapy dogs, helped conduct a six-week training program to certify the volunteers’ dogs at the end of last year. A number of participants, like Dobson, even underwent the training so that they, too, can now train and certify other dogs.

With the dogs trained and certified, the research project—supported by a grant from the American Therapeutic Recreation Foundation—could begin. The students in the course were paired up, some with a dog handler and their dog, others with another student. The teams then were randomly assigned to visit residents at three area nursing homes. The facilities were selected because all have certified therapeutic recreation specialists or assistants on staff, all graduates of USM’s recreation and leisure studies program.

Selected residents received one-hour visits by a student, dog handler and a dog, others were visited by teams of students, and still others did not receive any visitors.

McCullough says the dogs were the “talk of the facilities,” which Kim Lunner ’99, the coordinator of therapeutic recreation at Cedars Nursing Care Center, says was indeed the case at Cedars. “The residents were looking forward to the dogs coming each week and would ask me, ‘Where are the dogs?’, ‘When are the dogs coming?’”

The project put smiles on the faces of the senior citizens who received visitors, but it also benefitted the students, who were required to keep journals and to complete a writing assignment reflecting on their experience. They got the chance to work in the community, to see how an assisted intervention program might be structured, and to work with nursing professionals, Richeson says.

Anne Cornell and Jaime Flaig, both senior sociology majors, say the experience made them more comfortable working with an older population. “It was really enlightening to talk to people who are coming from such a different place than you are,” Cornell says.

Like Dobson, both students say they want to volunteer in a similar setting in the future. “You could see how happy the residents were when we would visit,” Flaig says. “They loved the company because I got the sense that they don’t get that many visitors.”

The research project is complete, but Richeson and McCullough continue their work. Richeson is now conducting a new project looking at the effects of animal-assisted therapy on patients with dementia at sites in York and Boston. She and McCullough also plan to submit a grant this summer to create what they are calling, “Mutts with a Mission,” an organization that would work with all parties involved to foster animal-assisted partnerships in the area. Says Richeson: “There seems to be a huge need in the area.”

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