Informal care

Background: At the end of life, formal care costs are high. Informal care (IC) costs, and their effects on outcomes, are not known. This study aimed to determine the IC costs for older adults in the last 3 months of life, and their relationships with outcomes, adjusting for care quality. Methods: Mortality follow-back postal survey. Setting: Palliative care services in England (London), Ireland (Dublin) and the USA (New York, San Francisco).

Objectives: This study aimed to compare informal caregivers/dementia caregivers to non-caregivers regarding alcohol consumption, smoking behavior, obesity, and insufficient physical activity and to identify caregiving-related factors (caregiving intensity, length of caregiving, relationship to the care recipient, and type of caregiving task) which are associated with behavioral risk factors in caregivers/dementia caregivers.; Methods: Using cross-sectional data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we performed the statistical analyses applyi

Coronavirus‐19 (COVID‐19) has reconfigured working lives with astonishing velocity. Older people have suffered the worst effects of the pandemic, with governments marginalizing or overlooking their needs. Women perform the majority of care for older people, often compromising their working lives and health. Yet in academic articles their voices are often filtered or aggregated in quantitative studies.

One of the challenges of providing healthcare services is to enhance its value (for patients, staff and the service) by integrating the informal caregivers into the care process, both concretely managing their patient's health conditions and treatment (co-executing) and participating in the whole healthcare process (co-planning). This study aims at exploring the co-production contribution to the healthcare process, analysing whether and how it is related to higher caregivers' satisfaction with service care and reduced staff burnout, in the eyes of the staff.

Objectives: To evaluate cost-effectiveness of an in-home respite care program in addition to standard community-based dementia care to support informal caregivers of persons with dementia compared with standard community-based dementia care. Methods: An age-dependent decision-analytic Markov model was applied from a third-party payer and a societal perspective projecting results of a quasi-experimental study over a time horizon of 5 years assuming a repetition of the program every 6 months.

This study explores care practices of older people outside formal care and without appealing to predefined relationships. We conducted interviews with 30 independent-living men and women aged 67–93 in three municipalities in Sweden. The interviews explored how they cared for themselves and other older people who were not family. Interviews were conducted between December 2017 and May 2018 and later transcribed and analysed using grounded theory.

Objective: Vietnam, like many low/middle income countries, lacks the infrastructure to provide information and psychosocial support to cancer patients and their carers. We undertook a codesign process to develop a web resource to inform and support carers. Methods: Cancer carers and health care professionals' perspectives regarding information and support needs and the content and delivery of web-based supports, were explored via five focus groups (n = 39) and semistructured interviews (n = 4) in Vietnam in 2018.

The aim of this study is to examine formal and informal care use among community-dwelling older Korean adults. Older adults aged between 65 and 85 (N = 516) in mid-size city, selected using the probability proportional sampling method, were interviewed in person. One third reported having at least one caregiver. Compared to respondents who did not use any informal/formal care, those who used any formal or informal care were older and were more likely to be prefrail or frail and experienced at least one hospitalization or emergency department use in the past year.

Health care in aging societies increasingly demands that relatives, partners, or friends provide informal care for loved ones at their end of life. Yet, being an informal caregiver involves significant health threats caused by so-called caregiver burden. To cope with the broad spectrum of challenges, informal caregivers seek social support in the care relationship network emerging around a (future) patient. However, obtaining social support is not limited to offline contexts. Members of online communities also provide experiential knowledge and social support.

In this paper, we take a fresh look at the magnitude of the trade-off between caring informally for a parent and paid work. We adopt a simultaneous approach with a primary focus on how hours of care are influenced by hours of work rather than the other way round. We also investigate the role that filial obligations play in choices of caring versus working. Using the SHARE data (2004 and 2006) we find that the elasticity of informal care hours in response to working hours is between −0.17 in the caregivers sample and −0.19 in the women-only caregivers sample; small but not negligible.