Patient selection

Background: Illness blogs are a way seriously ill people communicate publicly about their illness journey. As communication about serious illness increases on social media, it is important to evaluate how this affects the family caregiver.

This paper highlights some of the challenges encountered when recruiting older people with heart failure into longitudinal, community-based research. It draws on the experience gained in a study to provide insights into the palliative care needs of older people with heart failure and the timing and need for service interventions. Five hundred and forty-two people with heart failure (New York Heart Association (NYHA) stages II-IV) and 213 of their informal carers were recruited from primary care practices in four areas of the UK.

Background There is a lack of instruments to measure the needs, stigma and informal care of people with schizophrenia that take account of sociocultural variation and patients' and formal and informal carers' opinions and experiences. Aims To develop questionnaires to measure stigma, needs and informal (non-professional) care for people with schizophrenia. Method We undertook the study in seven countries and in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

AIM: To reflect on the methodological challenges of conducting a study exploring the effects on quality of life of being an informal carer for a person with palliative heart failure, as well as the factors that influence a carer's perception of caring.

BACKGROUND: There are multi-faceted influences on the positive and negative effects of being a carer for a patient with palliative heart failure. By conducting a mixed methods study the aim was to examine and explore similarities and differences of the phenomenon of being a carer.

Aims and objectives: The purpose of our paper was to explore primary caregivers' experience of the way public mental health nurses and other mental health clinicians responded to them as primary carers of older adults with mental illness.

Background: As populations age, the prevalence of mental illness in older adults will increase and the burden of care placed on family carers will intensify. While family carers are essential to the well-being and quality of life of older adults with mental illness, they frequently experience marginalisation from clinicians.

This paper examines key challenges and strategies for including older people with dementia in an ethnographic study of quality of life in institutional care settings. The methods of interview and observation are described in relation to meeting four research challenges: verbal communication impairment, memory loss, decision-making capacity, and emotional disposition.