Primary care

Informal carers (i.e. people who provide unpaid care to family and/or friends) are crucial in supporting people with long-term conditions. Caring negatively impacts on carers’ health and experiences of health services. Internationally and nationally, policies, legislation, professional guidance and research advocate for health and care services to do more to support carers. This study explored the views of health and social care providers, commissioners and policy makers about the role and scope for strengthening health service support for carers.

What is known about this topic Family caregiving has become more onerous in the last two decades.Family physicians have the potential to reach the majority of caregivers throughout the care trajectory.The demand for primary care to support caregivers comes primarily from researchers or advocacy organisations.

Self‐management by older persons could be influenced by the level of trust found in triads of informal carers, formal care providers and care recipient, the older person. Little research has been done on care providers' trust in older persons. This study aims to explore the level of trust that informal carers and home care nurses have in older persons, the extent of alignment in triads and the relationship between trust in older persons and self‐management.

Objectives Informal caregivers of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) experience a heavy caregiver burden, but few studies have explored what support they need. The aim of this study was to describe perceptions of healthcare support to informal caregivers, both from the family caregiver's and the staff's perspective. Design A qualitative interview study involving semi-structured interviews and analysed with content analysis.

Background: A shift in the work-divide among generations and an ageing population have altered the balance of care and support between families and welfare states. Although state policy has increasingly acknowledged that older adults ageing in place receive support from family members, how adult children perceive their collaboration with their parents and health care professionals in reablement services remains unclear.

This study aimed to examine the early impact of the Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers (PCAFC) on Veteran health care utilization and costs. A pre-post cohort design including a nonequivalent control group was used to understand how Veterans' use of Veteran Affairs health care and total health care costs changed in 6-month intervals up to 3 years after PCAFC enrollment. The control group was an inverse probability of treatment weighted sample of Veterans whose caregivers applied for, but were not accepted into, PCAFC.

Background: General practitioners (GPs), nurses and informal caregivers are often jointly involved in healthcare situations in which ethical issues play an important role.; Objectives: To describe ethical problems from the perspective of these three groups and to investigate whether there is a common experience of ethical issues in primary care.; Methods: We conducted six focus groups with general practitioners, nurses and informal caregivers in Germany.

Objectives To investigate the experiences and views of people living with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), their family carers and healthcare professionals of vision assessment tests. Design A qualitative investigation using video recordings of vision assessments, semistructured interviews and audio recordings of a focus group. Interviews and focus group used broad, open questions around the topic to prompt and guide discussion. Video and audio recordings were transcribed, manually coded and analysed using framework analysis.

Background: Informal caregivers of people with dementia in Beijing are increasingly called upon to provide home-based care for their patients due to the increasing number of dementia patients and the shortage of standardized institutional solutions of care for patients in China.

Objectives: Standardized measurement of caregiver stress is a component of Medicare’s new health care benefit supporting care planning for people with dementia. In this article we identify existing measures of caregiver stress, strain and burden and propose specific criteria for choosing tools that may be suitable for wide use in primary care settings. We reviewed 22 measures and identified one, the Kingston Caregiver Stress Scale (KCSS), which met all the proposed criteria but had not been studied in a U.S. sample.