The older residents in the long-term care facilities frequently experience loneliness, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. The negative emotions might affect residents' quality of life and even increase their mortality. Improving residents' psychological health problems is one of the important tasks for nursing staff. Individual experiences a sense of security and feels of being cared for after tactile massage (TM). Through skin-to-skin contact, the oxytocin can be induced to make individual feel relaxed, reduce anxiety, and feel pleasure. Moreover, TM does not need any tools and can be conducted at any time and any place. It is very convenient and accessible. Therefore, the purpose of this study is going to examine the effects of tactile massage in improving older residents' mental health and physiological effect in LTCFs. The randomized controlled trial research design and convenience sampling will be employed. LTCFs will be selected and contacted by researchers. The eligible residents will be randomly assigned to intervention group and comparison group (usual care). The intervention group will receive two 15-min tactile massages per week for 4 weeks. The comparison group will receive regular care and activities. Data will be collected at baseline, after intervention using questionnaires including demographic and related information questionnaire, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) loneliness Scale version 3, Geriatric Anxiety Inventory, Geriatric Depression Scale short form (GDS-SF).Chinese Happiness Inventory, comfort Visual Analogue Scale, Relaxed Visual Analogue Scale, and vital signs. Data analysis will be conducted by performing percentage, mean, t-test, chi-square, and generalized estimating equations (GEE) using SPSS 22.0 software. Intention-to-treat analysis will be applied in this study.
The older residents in the long-term care facilities frequently experience loneliness, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. Improving residents' psychological health problems is one of the important tasks for nursing staff. Individual experiences a sense of security and feels of being cared for after tactile massage (TM).The randomized controlled trial research design and convenience sampling will be employed. Through skin-to-skin contact, the oxytocin can be induced to make individual feel relaxed, reduce anxiety, and feel pleasure. The randomized controlled trial research design and convenience sampling will be employed. The eligible residents will be randomly assigned to intervention group and comparison group (usual care). The intervention group will receive two 15-min tactile massages per week for 4 weeks. The comparison group will receive regular care and activities.