Van Den Noortgate, Nele

Context Symptom management is essential in the end-of-life care of long-term care facility residents. Objectives To study discrepancies and possible associated factors in staff and family carers' symptom assessment scores for residents in the last week of life. Methods A postmortem survey in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Finland: staff and family carers completed the End-of-Life in Dementia-Comfort Assessment in Dying scale, rating 14 symptoms on a one-point to three-point scale. Higher scores reflect better comfort.

Objectives: To evaluate cost-effectiveness of an in-home respite care program in addition to standard community-based dementia care to support informal caregivers of persons with dementia compared with standard community-based dementia care. Methods: An age-dependent decision-analytic Markov model was applied from a third-party payer and a societal perspective projecting results of a quasi-experimental study over a time horizon of 5 years assuming a repetition of the program every 6 months.

Objectives: Dementia is a major public health problem with important physical, psychosocial, emotional, and financial consequences for patients, their caregivers, and society. Since patients prefer to be managed at home, extensive research has been conducted into effectiveness of psychosocial interventions to support informal caregivers. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of an in-home respite care program.