Authors (including presenting author) :
Jason CHEUNG P(1), Carol HO KW(2), Eddie CHAN TC(2)
Affiliation :
(1) Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital
(2) Cheshire Home Chung Hum Kok
Introduction :
The Original Home of Cheshire Home aims at providing a home-like environment for quality extended care to persons with disabilities. The residents of Original Home are aged 18 or above, with permanent physical disability and stable medical conditions. They joined the Home to adapt a group living at their own free will. For the long stay residents in CCH, repetitive daily routine and physical limitations would be the major factors affecting their psychological well-beings in terms of sense of happiness, sense of controls, inter-personal relationship, etc. Concerning that, it was planned to promote their psychological well-being by an experiential psychosocial group. The group design was based on PERMA Model (Seligman, 2011), which is a theoretical model of happiness developed by Seligman for helping people work towards a life of fulfillment, happiness and meaning. The Model was constructed with five elements – positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment. It could also help people discover and use new cognitive and emotional tools. This program aimed at facilitating the participants to learn and experience those 5 elements of the Model, and to gain insights and wisdom from their life situations and occasions, through a group-work experience. Psychosocial group activities and discussions, expressive art activities, body-mind-spirit experiential community walk, mindfulness exercises, were adopted into each group sessions respectively as a comprehensive body-mind-spirit intervention model.
Objectives :
To enhance psychological well-beings of the participants with the elements of positive psychology
Methodology :
- Patients with positive-psychological needs were referred by social worker of MSSU to the program.
- Pre-group interviews were conducted with the patients.
- Recruited patients experienced a seven-session group program (6 indoor sessions and 1 outing session)
- Pre and post assessment were conducted with Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and Flourishing Scale (Diener, E., Wirtz, D., Tov, W., Kim-Prieto, C., Choi. D., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R., 2009)
Result & Outcome :
- 7 patients were recruited and 5 patients completed both the pre and post assessment.
- 100% of patients demonstrated improved results (happiness, engagement, self-efficacy and self-confidence, self-image, optimism, etc.) in both post-program assessments.
