New zealand

Background: Eating disorders are widely recognized as serious illnesses, with complex psychological and physiological comorbidities. Affected individuals face a protracted and challenging treatment journey which, particularly for children and adolescents, requires significant input from family members as carers. This study investigated the perspectives and experiences of those caring for family members with an eating disorder diagnosis.

Aims To examine the dual caregiving and nursing responsibilities of nurses in New Zealand with a view to identifying potential strategies, policies and employment practices that may help to retain nurses with caregiving responsibilities in the workplace. Background As the nursing workforce ages, child-bearing is delayed and older family members are living longer, family caregiving responsibilities are impacting more on the working life of nurses. This may complicate accurate workforce planning assumptions.

Background: With more care taking place in the home, family carers play an important role in supporting patients. Some family carers undertake technical health procedures generally managed by health professionals in hospital settings (e.g. managing a tracheostomy or enteral feeding). Aim: To explore how family carers learn to manage technical health procedures in order to help health professionals better understand and support this process.

Background: Family carers, as a "shadow workforce", are foundational to the day-to-day integration of health service delivery for older family members living with complex health needs. This paper utilises Haggerty's model of continuity of care to explore the contribution of family carers' to the provision of care and support for an older family member's chronic condition within the context of health service delivery.

Background: Disability following a stroke often requires family, commonly a spouse, to provide care enabling the stroke survivor to return home. Immediate or extended family and friends may help provide direct care or support the primary caregiver. While family members share the common stroke experience, this is lived within the context of separate lives. Research examining the individual nuances, roles and contribution of family and/or friends forming part of collective stroke networks, has largely been overlooked.

Background: A key challenge in meeting the palliative care needs of people in advanced age is the multiple healthcare and social service agencies typically involved in their care. The 'patient navigator' model, originally developed in cancer care, is the professional solution most often recommended to address this challenge. However, little attention has been paid, or is known, about the role that family carers play in enabling their dying relatives to negotiate service gaps.

Drawing on carer narratives from research undertaken in New Zealand, this paper considers the interrelationship between place and the care-giving experience. In doing so, it considers: first, how informal carers of older people experience the transition in the place of care from the home to care homes; second, how they negotiate new identities for themselves as carers in these new care settings; and third, carers' views on how we might develop more inclusive models of care in care home settings.

The aims of this study were to: (a) identify New Zealand informal carers' support needs; (b) assess caregivers' depression; and (c) assess positive and negative aspects of caregiving. A sample of 287 carers from throughout New Zealand was recruited by advertisements in carer support organizations literature, in 2008. Data were collected using Centre for Epidemiologic Short Depression scale (CES-D10), Caregivers Reaction Assessment scale (CRA), and open-ended questions. Carer burden was significant (p ≤ .01) in the 60 to 69 age group.

The aim of this paper was to gain an in-depth understanding of the way the lives of individuals supporting someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder is a severe, recurrent and chronic mental disorder that has a significant impact on the lives of those who experience it and the people supporting them. It is often the subsyndromal symptoms that cause major impairment in functioning and can have financial, social, interpersonal and health impacts for carers. A qualitative thematic analysis was chosen to enable an in-depth exploration of participants' experiences.

The aim of this study was to explore the lived experience of palliative nursing care for different generations of a migrant family in the New Zealand context. Methodology used was an intrinsic case study. The twin threads of the family's region and their immigration experience influenced their experiences and their ways of coping in the four domains of family relationships, the support they received from their community, their ability to communicate, and their relationship with palliative care services.