Pilot projects

Background: Family caregivers of cancer patients often experience an impaired quality of life (QOL) and emotional distress as a result of their caregiving duties, which may potentially influence the quality of care of their care recipients. The COPE (Caregivers of cancer Outpatients' Psycho-Education support group therapy) intervention was developed as a response to the lack of work done among family caregivers of ambulatory cancer patients in Asia.

Background: Palliative care in Indonesia is problematic because of cultural and socio-economic factors. Family in Indonesia is an integral part of caregiving process in inpatient and outpatient settings. However, most families are not adequately prepared to deliver basic care for their sick family member.

Background: Carer factors prevent patients achieving timely and appropriate hospital discharge. There is a lack of research into interventions to support carers at hospital discharge. Aim: To explore whether and how family carers are currently supported during patient discharge at end of life; to assess perceived benefits, acceptability and feasibility of using The Carer Support Needs Assessment Tool (CSNAT) Approach in the hospital setting to support carers. Design: Qualitative.

Family caregivers of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) live stressful lives in which they spend most of their time caring for their loved ones and managing difficult situations, thereby reducing the time spent in taking care of themselves. This situation may last several years. Previous literature has widely highlighted that this situation reduces caregivers’ quality of life and increases their psychological distress and risk of health problems, but there is a lack of studies that focus on psychological interventions for these situations.

Background: People with dementia and family carers often experience difficulties communicating together. These difficulties are considered to contribute significantly to the depression, anxiety and negative feelings such as guilt often reported by dementia family carers. Aims: To develop and contribute to the theory and evidence base for single‐component, psychosocial interventions that address these difficulties by evaluating the effectiveness of the Talking Sense programme which was designed to reflect existing best evidence.

In this cross-sectional study, we evaluated the quality of discharge documentation for stroke patients discharged home. Participants were stroke patients discharged from a regional tertiary acute and rehabilitation hospital in Australia from 2014 to 2015. Compliance with expected discharge documentation and its relationship with readmission was measured using an audit instrument for stroke patients (n = 54), and a post-discharge survey of carers was conducted.

Background: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a leading cause of hospitalizations. Interventional studies focusing on the hospital-to-home transition for COPD patients are few.

Aim Guidelines describing how to carry out a randomised controlled trial (RCT) provide no advice concerning when to measure an intervention effect. Possibly as a result, most papers give no rationales for the time frames chosen for data collection. This paper discusses four general strategies to identify when to collect data. Furthermore, an additional individual strategy concerning the current German young carers project is presented.

Carers are often too wrapped up in their duties to think about their needs. This article reports on a pilot project in Kensington and Chelsea, run by charity wpf Counselling and Psychotherapy and funded by the council. The project aimed to offer carers of older people and people with mental health problems counselling to help them gain independence. The article also contains a brief case study.

We evaluated a care-coordination project assisted by a screen-phone to support and educate caregivers. A total of 113 caregivers of home-dwelling veterans with dementia were recruited to the study: 72 were white, 32 were African American and nine were Hispanic. Caregivers were assessed for burden, depression, coping, quality of life, knowledge and satisfaction. None of the outcome measures changed significantly after twelve months. Forty care-recipient and caregiver dyads responded to the twelve-month telephone satisfaction survey.