What therapy dogs bring back to care homes

Doges Editorial · 2026-06-24 · 4 min read

A new University of Alberta study asks whether regular therapy dog visits can transform life in long-term care — and the researcher behind it found the answer, years ago, in her grandfather's hospital room.

Brittany DeGraves was a student nurse on placement at a long-term care home when she first watched it happen. There were residents who wouldn't talk to staff or to other students — who sat quietly through the days with their faces carefully still. Then the animals arrived. "There were some residents who didn't really open up to the staff or students," she says, "but when the animals came around, their faces just lit up and they finally talked. It was so interesting to see that something so small could mean so much." That observation became the center of a research career. This month, as reported in the University of Alberta's Folio journal, she launched a pilot project in Edmonton built on a feasibility study she published in BMC Geriatrics — and the conviction, sharpened over years, that therapy dog visits should be part of standard care in every long-term care home in Canada.

Eighty-seven percent

In Canada's long-term care homes, 69 percent of residents have dementia. Eighty-seven percent have some form of cognitive impairment. These are the residents DeGraves, a PhD candidate in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Nursing, spends her days thinking about: people living out their final years in a system designed primarily around safety and medical management. Safety, she has come to believe, is a floor — not a ceiling.

Social isolation is among the most significant contributors to poor health outcomes in older adults, associated with accelerated cognitive decline, depression, and higher mortality. For long-term care residents removed from neighborhoods, daily routines, and any pets they may have had for years, isolation is often the baseline. DeGraves' argument is that animal-assisted programs offer a simple, low-cost, non-pharmacological way to begin addressing it.

Bringing even a small moment of home for the individuals in care homes is addressing not only mental health but also social isolation. No matter what age or what conditions we have, we all deserve to live a life with joy. And I think that's something that is often missing in long-term care.

— Brittany DeGraves, PhD candidate, University of Alberta Faculty of Nursing

The man he used to be

DeGraves' interest in this work didn't start in a library. It started in a hospital room, when her grandfather had a stroke. He could no longer recognize his wife, his children, or his grandchildren. The person they all remembered had become unreachable through the usual channels. Then a therapy dog walked into his room.

This was something that reminded him of himself and let us see the man he used to be. It was a reminder that he was still that person and he deserved to have that little source of happiness, however short it may have been.

— Brittany DeGraves

That experience — a dog reaching through cognitive damage to reconnect someone to themselves — is not fully understood by science. But it is documented, again and again, in care homes around the world. DeGraves later spent a term at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, studying Green Care Farms: residential dementia facilities where residents participate in daily life alongside sheep, cows, rabbits, and dogs as much as they are able. What she saw there confirmed what her grandfather's hospital room had shown her: that access to animals doesn't merely improve mood. It makes people feel capable. Present. Themselves.

"They had sheep, cows, rabbits and dogs and it was just an eye-opening experience to see not only how happy the residents were, but how independent they felt," she says.

The feasibility study

For her published feasibility study in BMC Geriatrics, DeGraves interviewed 14 long-term care staff members, two residents, and two community members, including an animal therapy volunteer and a person living with dementia. All agreed that animal-assisted visits could meaningfully improve the social isolation, mental health, and wellbeing of older adults in care. The evidence for benefit was clear. What had been missing was the rigorous trial to quantify it. "More rigorous research into this potentially important non-pharmacological intervention is urgently needed," she concluded.

The barriers are real, and she names them plainly: some residents fear animals, some have allergies, infection control is a legitimate concern, and not every care home has the administrative infrastructure to manage consistent visiting programs. Her proposed solutions involve advance communication with residents and families, regular and predictable scheduling, one-on-one visits rather than group sessions, and rigorous screening of both animals and their volunteer handlers.

The scientific foundation she is building on is real but thin. A 2023 network meta-analysis in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience — drawing on 19 randomized controlled trials — found that animal-assisted therapy produced a borderline significant reduction in depression scores among dementia patients compared to usual care in direct comparisons (standardized mean difference: −0.34, p = 0.045), a result that did not hold across the broader network analysis. Effects on agitation, cognitive function, and quality of life fell short of significance. The reviewers concluded the existing trials are too few, too small, and too inconsistent in protocol to support clinical guidelines. That is exactly the gap DeGraves is working to close: three comparison arms, standardized outcome measures, a protocol designed to be replicated. (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1095996/full)

Six weeks in Edmonton

This summer, the pilot is running. Volunteers and their dogs from the St. John's Ambulance Therapy Dog Program are visiting residents at an Edmonton long-term care home on a regular schedule, over six weeks. DeGraves is measuring quality-of-life outcomes before and after, comparing results against a group receiving human-only visits and a standard-care control group. The goal is a standardized protocol that could eventually be adopted at scale across Canadian care homes.

Making those days enjoyable

This is where these older adults are going to live, most of them for the rest of their days. So, let's make those days enjoyable.

— Brittany DeGraves

There is something specific about what a dog brings into a room that resists easy clinical description. It is not the same as a family visit, and not the same as medication or structured therapy. It is something older and quieter — a species that has been reading human faces for fifteen thousand years, one that comes close when it senses distress, that does not require you to explain yourself or perform being okay. If you have ever walked through your front door at the end of a hard day and felt your dog greet you as though your return was the event it had been waiting for all afternoon, you already know something about what DeGraves is trying to bring into a long-term care home. She's trying to put that specific feeling inside a building full of people who haven't felt it in a while — and she has a summer of data, and a grandfather's face in a hospital room, to prove it's worth the effort.