Residence Characteristics/statistics & numerical data

Background: Our ageing society is putting tremendous strain on public health and welfare programs to meet the needs of ageing individuals. Promoting informal caregiving is one way for policymakers to reduce this burden. However, caregiving may be experienced as stressful and is associated with adverse health consequences. While quite a lot of research focuses on caregiving for community-dwelling older adults, little is known about informal care in institutionalised long-term care (ILTC).

There has been little research that provides a comprehensive account of the nature and aspects of information needs of informal carers. The authors have previously developed and validated a framework that accounts for major underlying states of information need. This paper aims to apply this framework to explore whether there are common demographic and socioeconomic characteristics that affect the information needs states of carers. A questionnaire about the information needs states was completed by 198 carers above 18 years old.