Zwingmann, Ina

Background: Up to two-thirds of dementia care is provided by family caregivers who often experience high burden, little support and adverse health outcomes. Enabling and supporting family caregivers to provide care at home prevents early institutionalisation of the person with dementia and alleviates the economic burden of dementia in the long term. General practitioners (GPs), as the first point of contact, have a key role in identifying and managing burden and care needs of family caregivers.

Although there are a number of support services accessible for most family dementia caregivers, many caregivers reject available and affordable support. Previous research suggests that rejections of support services may result from insufficient fit of available services with caregivers’ unmet needs and a lack of acknowledgement of caregivers’ unmet needs and associated support services.

The objectives of this cross-sectional analysis were to determine healthcare resource utilization and cost for community-dwelling patients with dementia (PWD) from a payer's and societal perspective, and to analyze the associations between costs and sociodemographic and clinical variables. Analysis of healthcare costs from a payer's perspective was based on a sample of 425 PWD, analysis of healthcare costs from societal perspective on a subsample of 254 PWD and their informal caregivers. Frequency of healthcare resource utilization was assessed by means of questionnaires.